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TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

A Record of Personal Experiences 
of the Supernatural 

BY 
SIDNEY DICKINSON 



With an Introduction By 

R. H. STETSON 

Professor of Psychology 
Oberlin College 

And a Prefatory Note By 

G. O. TUBBY 

Assistant Secretary American 
Society Psychical Research 




NEW YORK 

DUFFIELD AND COMPANY 

1920 



■K 



Copyright, 1920, by 
DUFFIELD AND COMPANY 



16 I92Q 



Printed in the United States of America 



©CI.A604585 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Prefatory Note vii 

Introduction 1 

Author's Preface 5 

I 

A Mystery of Two Continents ........ 11 

"A Spirit of Health" 25 

The Miracle of the Flowers . . 41 

The Midnight Horseman ......... 57 

II 

THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

chapter page 

I. The Condemned 75 

II. The Crime 83 

III. The Flight and Capture ...... 96 

IV. The Expiation 105 

V. The House on the Hill 116 

VI. On the Wings of the Storm 126 

VII. A Ghostly Co-Tenancy 141 

VIII. The Dead Walks 152 

IX. The Goblins of the Kitchen 162 

X. A Spectral Burglary 178 

XI. "Rest, Rest, Perturbed Spirit V 187 

XII. The Demons of the Dark 200 



PREFATORY NOTE 

It is a pleasure to testify that the MS. of this 
volume of stories has been submitted with 
abundant testimonies from the individuals who 
knew their author and his facts at first hand, 
to the American Society for Psychical Research 
for approval or disapproval. 

No more interesting or better attested 
phenomena of the kind have come to our atten- 
tion, and we have asked that a copy of the MS. 
be filed permanently in the Society's archives 
for preservation from loss. These accounts 
by Mr. Dickinson bear internal evidence to 
their true psychic origin and to the trained 
observer scarcely need corroboration or other 
external support. They ring true. And they 
are, in addition, moving human documents, with 
a strong literary appeal. 

Gertrude Ogden Tubby, 

Asst. Sec, A. S. P. R. 
April 5, 1920. 



[vii] 



INTRODUCTION 

This account of striking and peculiar events 
by Mr. Sidney Dickinson is but the fulfillment 
of an intention of the writer interrupted by sud- 
den death. Mr. Dickinson had taken careful 
notes of the happenings described and, being a 
professional observer and writer, it was inevit- 
able that he should preserve the narrative. He 
had been slow to prepare it for publication be- 
cause of the prominent and enabling part played 
by his wife in the occurrences. After her death, 
when an increasing interest in the subject had 
developed, it seemed to Mr. Dickinson that the 
narrative might be received as he had written 
it — as a careful and exact account of most re- 
markable events. In reverence to the memory 
of his wife and out of respect to the friends 
concerned he could not present it otherwise to 
the public. 

As the narrative is of some time ago and the 
principal witnesses are dead or inaccessible the 
account must stand for itself; the endorsement 
of the American Society for Physical Research 

[i] 



INTRODUCTION 

testifies to its intrinsic interest. But the char- 
acter and personality of the writer is a vital con- 
sideration. Mr. Sidney Dickinson was a pro- 
fessional journalist and lecturer. After gradua- 
tion from Amherst in 1874 he served on the 
Springfield Republican and the San Francisco 
Bulletin. Later he was prominent as an art 
and dramatic critic on the staff of the Boston 
Journal. After extended study of art in Euro- 
pean galleries he lectured before many colleges, 
universities and art associations. He spent 
some years in Australia, where many of the 
events of this account took place. While 
travelling in Europe and Australia he was cor- 
respondent for a number of papers and maga- 
zines, including Scribner's Monthly, the New 
York Times, the Boston Journal, and the 
Springfield Republican. During a visit to New 
Zealand he was engaged by the Colonial Gov- 
ernment to give lectures on New Zealand in 
Australia and America. 

His work and his associates testify to careful 
observation and sane judgment. Mr. Dickin- 
son had an unusual memory, a keen sense of 
accuracy and he was cool and practical rather 
than emotional or excitable. No one who was 
much with him in the later days could doubt 
the entire sincerity of the man. There could 

w 



INTRODUCTION 

have been no ulterior motive as the account 
itself will show. The narrative was written be- 
cause he felt that it might well be a contribu- 
tion of some scientific interest. 

R. H. Stetson, 

Professor of Psychology, 

Oberlin College. 



[3] 



AUTHOR'S PREFACE 

These stories are not "founded upon fact" ; 
they are fact. If I may claim any merit for 
them it is this — they are absolutely and literally 
true. They seem to me to be unusual even 
among the mass of literature that has been 
written upon the subject they illustrate; if they 
possess any novelty at all it may be found in 
the fact that the phenomena they describe 
occurred, for the most part, without invitation, 
without reference to "conditions," favorable or 
otherwise, and without mediumistic interven- 
tion. 

I have written these stories with no purpose 
to bolster up any theory or to strengthen or 
weaken any belief, and I must say frankly that, 
in my opinion, they neither prove nor disprove 
anything whatsoever. I am not a believer, any 
more than I am a sceptic, in regard to so-called 
"Spiritualism," and have consistently held to 
my non-committal attitude in this matter by 
refraining, all my life, from consulting a 
medium or attending a professional seance. In 
the scientific study of Psychology I have a lay- 
man's interest, but even that is curious rather 

[53 



author's preface 

than expectant; — my experience, which I think 
this book will show to have been considerable, 
in the observation of occult phenomena has 
failed to afford me anything like a positive clue 
to their causes or meaning. 

In fact, I have long ago arrived at the 
opinion that any one who devotes himself to 
the study of what, for want of a better word, 
we may call "supernatural" will inevitably and 
at last find himself landed in an impasse. The 
first steps in the pursuit are easy, and seduc- 
tively promise final arrival at the goal — but in 
every case of which I, at least, have knowledge 
the course abruptly ends (sometimes sooner, 
sometimes later) against a wall so high as to 
be unscalable, not to be broken through, ex- 
tending to infinity on either hand. 

That disembodied spirits can at least make 
their existence known to us appears to me as a 
well-approved fact; that they are "forbid to 
tell the secrets of their prison-house" is my 
equally firm conviction. I am aware that such 
an opinion can be only personal, and that it is 
hopeless to attempt to commend it by satis- 
factory evidence; those who have had experi- 
ences similar to those which I have recorded 
(and their number is much greater than is gen- 
erally supposed) will understand how this 
[6] 



author's preface 

opinion has been reached — to others it will be 
inconceivable, as based upon what seems to 
them impossible. 

If what I have written should seem to throw 
any light, however faint, upon the problem of 
the Mystery of Existence in whose solution 
some of the profoundest intellects of the world 
are at present engaged, my labor will have been 
worth the while. I submit the results of this 
labor as a record, with a lively sense of the 
responsibility I assume by its publication. 



[7] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 



A MYSTERY OF TWO CONTINENTS 

This story, as well as the one that immedi- 
ately follows it, was first related to the late 
Wilkie Collins, the noted English novelist, 
with whom I had the good fortune to be ac- 
quainted — and who, as all his intimates know, 
and as those whose knowledge of him is derived 
from his romances may surmise, was an earnest 
and careful student of occult phenomena. I 
placed in his hands all the concurrent data which 
I could secure, and furnished the names of wit- 
nesses to the incidents — which names are now 
in possession of the publishers of this volume — 
equipped with which he carried out a thorough 
personal investigation. The result of this in- 
vestigation he made known to me, one pleasant 
spring afternoon, in his study in London. 

"During my life," he said, "I have made a 
considerable study of the supernatural, but the 
knowledge I have gained is not very definite. 
Take the matter of apparitions, for instance, 
to which the two interesting stories you have 
submitted to me relate : — I have come to regard 
these as subjective rather than objective phe- 
nomena, projections from an excited or stimu- 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

lated brain, not actual existences. Why, I have 
seen thousands of ghosts myself! Many a 
night, after writing until two o'clock in the 
morning, and fortifying myself for my work 
with strong coffee, I have had to shoulder them 
aside as I went upstairs to bed. These ap- 
parent presences were nothing to me, since I 
knew perfectly well that their origin was no- 
where else than in my overwrought nerves — and 
I have come to conclude that most cases of 
visions of this sort are to be explained by 
attributing them to a temporary or permanent 
disorganization of the brain of the percipient. 
Mind, I do not say all cases — there are many 
that are not to be set aside so readily. Again, 
it is not easy to arrive at the facts in any given 
case; even if the observer is honest, he may not 
have cultivated the habit of exact statement — 
moreover, stories are apt to grow by repeti- 
tion, and a tendency to exaggerate is common 
to most of us. Now and then, however, I have 
come upon an account of supernatural visitation 
which seems an exception to the general run, 
and upsets my theories; and I must say that, 
having from time to time investigated at least 
fifteen hundred such instances, the two stories 
you have furnished me are of them all the best 
authenticated." 

[12] 



A MYSTERY OF TWO CONTINENTS 

Some years ago, in the course of a tour of 
art study which took me through the principal 
countries of Europe, I found myself in Naples, 
having arrived there by a leisurely progress that 
began at Gibraltar, and had brought me by 
easy stages, and with many stops en route, 
through the Mediterranean. The time of year 
was late February, and the season, even for 
Southern Italy, was much advanced; — so, in 
visiting the Island of Capri (the exact date, I 
recollect, was February 22) I found this most 
charming spot in the Vesuvian Bay smiling and 
verdant, and was tempted by the brilliant sun- 
shine and warm breezes to explore the hilly 
country which rose behind the port at which I 
had landed. 

The fields upon the heights were green with 
grass, and spangled with delicate white flowers 
bearing a yellow centre, which, while smaller 
than our familiar American field-daisies, and 
held upon more slender stalks, reminded me of 
them. Having in mind certain friends in then 
bleak New England, whence I had strayed into 
this Land of Summer, I plucked a number of 
these blossoms and placed them between the 
leaves of my guide-book — Baedeker's "Southern 
Italy," — intending to inclose them in letters 
which I then planned to write to these friends, 

[13] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

contrasting the conditions attending their 
"Washington's Birthday" with those in which 
I fortunately found myself. 

Returning to Naples, the many interests of 
that city put out of my head for the time the 
thought of letter-writing, and three days later 
I took the train for Rome, with my corre- 
spondence still in arrears. The first day of my 
stay in Rome was devoted to an excursion by 
carriage into the Campagna, and on the way 
back to the city I stopped to see that most in- 
teresting and touching of Roman monuments, 
the Tomb of Cecilia Metella. Every tourist 
knows and has visited that beautiful memorial 
— so I do not need to describe its massive 
walls, its roof (now fallen and leaving the 
sepulchre open to the sky) and the heavy turf 
which covers the earth of its interior. This 
green carpet of Nature, when I visited the 
tomb, was thickly strewn with fragrant violets, 
and of these, as of the daisylike flowers I had 
found in Capri, I collected several, and placed 
them in my guide-book — this time Baedeker's 
"Central Italy." 

I mention these two books — the "Southern" 
and the "Central Italy" — because they have an 
important bearing on my story. 

The next day, calling at my banker's, I saw 

[14] 



A MYSTERY OF TWO CONTINENTS 

an announcement that letters posted before four 
o'clock that afternoon would be forwarded to 
catch the mail for New York by a specially fast 
steamer for Liverpool, and hastened back to 
my hotel with the purpose of preparing, and 
thus expediting, my much-delayed correspond- 
ence. The most important duty of the moment 
seemed to be the writing of a letter to my wife, 
then living in Boston, and to this I particularly 
addressed myself. I described my trip through 
the Mediterranean and my experience in Naples 
and Rome, and concluded my letter as fol- 
lows: 

"In Naples I found February to be like our 
New England May, and in Capri, which I 
visited on 'Washington's Birthday/ I found the 
heights of the island spangled over with delicate 
flowers, some of which I plucked, and enclose 
in this letter. And, speaking of flowers, I send 
you also some violets which I gathered yester- 
day at the Tomb of Cecelia Metella, outside 
of Rome — you know about this monument, 
or, if not, you can look up its history, and save 
me from transcribing a paragraph from the 
guide-book. I send you these flowers from 
Naples and Rome, respectively, in order that 
you may understand in what agreeable sur- 
roundings I find myself, as compared with the 

[15] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

ice and snow and bitter cold which are probably 
your experience at this season." 

Having finished the letter, I took from the 
guide-book on "Central Italy" which lay on 
the table before me, the violets from the Tomb 
of Cecilia Metella, enclosed them, with the 
sheets I had written, in an envelope, sealed and 
addressed it, and was about to affix the stamp, 
when it suddenly occurred to me that I had left 
out the flowers I had plucked at Capri. These, 
I then recalled, were still in the guide-book for 
"Southern Italy," which I had laid away in 
my portmanteau as of no further present use 
to me. Accordingly I unstrapped and unlocked 
the portmanteau, found the guide-book, took 
out the flowers from Capri which were still be- 
tween its leaves, opened and destroyed the en- 
velope already addressed, added the daisies to 
the violets, and put the whole into a new in- 
closure, which I again directed, stamped, and 
duly dropped into the mail-box at the bankers'. 

I am insistent upon these details because they 
particularly impressed upon my mind the cer- 
tainty that both varieties of flowers were in- 
closed in the letter to my wife. Subsequent 
events would have been strange enough if I 
had not placed the flowers in the letter at all — 
but the facts above stated assure me that there 
[16] 



A MYSTERY OF TWO CONTINENTS 

is no question that I did so, and. make what fol- 
lowed more than ever inexplicable. 

So much for the beginning of the affair — in 
Italy; now for its conclusion— in New Eng- 
land. 

During my year abroad, my wife was living, 
as I have said, in Boston, occupying at the Win- 
throp House, on Bowdoin street — a hotel which 
has since, I believe, been taken down — a suite 
of rooms comprising parlor, bedroom and bath. 
With her was my daughter by a former mar- 
riage, whose mother had died at her birth, 
some seven years before. On the same floor of 
the hotel were apartments occupied by Mrs. 
Celia Thaxter, a woman whose name is well 
known in American literature, and with whom 
my wife sustained a very intimate friendship. 
I am indebted for the facts I am now setting 
down not only to my wife, who gave me an 
oral account of them on my return from 
Europe, four months later, but also to this 
lady who wrote out and preserved a record of 
them at the time of their occurrence, and sent 
me a copy of the same while I was still abroad. 

About ten days after I had posted my letter, 
inclosing the flowers from Capri and Rome, 
my wife suddenly awoke in the middle of the 

[17] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

night, and saw standing at the foot of her bed 
the form of the child's mother. The aspect 
of the apparition was so serene and gracious 
that, although greatly startled, she felt no 
alarm; moreover, it had once before appeared 
to her, as the reader will learn in the second 
story of this series, which, for reasons of my 
own, I have not arranged in chronological 
order. Then she heard, as if from a voice at 
a great distance, these words : "I have brought 
you some flowers from Sidney." At the next 
instant the figure vanished. 

The visitation had been so brief that my 
wife, although she at once arose and lighted the 
gas, argued with herself that she had been 
dreaming, and after a few minutes extinguished 
the light and returned to bed, where she slept 
soundly until six o'clock the next morning. Al- 
ways an early riser, she dressed at once and 
went from her bedroom, where the child was 
still sleeping, to her parlor. In the centre of 
the room was a table, covered with a green 
cloth, and as she entered and happened to glance 
at it she saw, to her surprise, a number of dried 
flowers scattered over it. A part of these she 
recognized as violets, but the rest were un- 
familiar to her, although they resembled very 
small daisies. 

ti8] 



'A MYSTERY OF TWO CONTINENTS 

The vision of the night before was at once 
forcibly recalled to her, and the words of the 
apparition, "I have brought you some flowers," 
seemed to have a meaning, though what it was 
she could not understand. After examining 
these strange blossoms for a time she returned 
to her chamber and awakened the child, whom 
she then took to see the flowers, and asked her 
if she knew anything about them. 

"Why, no, mamma," the little girl replied; 
"I have never seen them before. I was read- 
ing my new book at the table last night until 
I went to bed, and if they were there I should 
have seen them." 

So the flowers were gathered up and placed 
on the shelf above the fireplace, and during the 
morning were exhibited to Mrs. Thaxter, who 
came in for a chat, and who, like my wife, could 
make nothing of the matter. 

At about four o'clock in the afternoon of 
that day the postman called at the hotel, bear- 
ing among his mail several letters for my wife, 
which were at once sent up to her. Among 
them was one that was postmarked "Rome" 
and addressed in my handwriting, and with this 
she sat down as the first to be read. It con- 
tained an account, among other things, of my 
experiences in Naples and Rome, and in due 

[19] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

course mentioned the enclosure of flowers from 
Capri and from the Tomb of Cecilia Metella. 
There were, however, no flowers whatever in 
the letter, although each sheet and the envelope 
were carefully examined; my wife even shook 
her skirts and made a search upon the carpet, 
thinking that the stated enclosure might have 
fallen out as the letter was opened. Nothing 
could be found — yet ten hours before the 
arrival of the letter, flowers exactly such as it 
described had been found on the centre-table! 

Mrs. Thaxter was summoned, and the two 
ladies marvelled greatly. Among Mrs. Thax- 
ter's friends in the city was a well-known 
botanist, and she at once suggested that the 
flowers be offered for his inspection. No time 
was lost in calling upon him, and the flowers 
were shown (without, however, the curious 
facts about them being mentioned), with the 
request that he state, if it were possible, whence 
they came. He examined them carefully and 
then said: 

"As to the violets, it is difficult to say where 
they grew, since these flowers, wherever they 
may be found in the world (and they are of 
almost universal occurrence, through cultiva- 
tion or otherwise) may everywhere be very 
much alike. Certain peculiarities in these speci- 

[20] 



A MYSTERY OF TWO CONTINENTS 

mens, however, coupled with the scent they still 
faintly retain and which is characteristic, in- 
cline me to the opinion that they came from 
some part of Southern Europe — perhaps 
France, but more likely Italy. As to the others, 
which, as you say, resemble small daisies, they 
must have come from some point about the 
Bay of Naples, as I am not aware of their 
occurrence elsewhere." 



[21] 



"A SPIRIT OF HEALTH 



"A SPIRIT OF HEALTH" 

It is common, and, in the main, a well- 
founded objection to belief in so-called super- 
natural manifestations, that they seem in 
general to subserve no purpose of usefulness 
or help to us who are still upon this mortal 
plane, and thus are unworthy of intelligences 
such as both love and reason suggest our de- 
parted friends to be. The mummeries and 
too-frequent juggleries of dark-seances, and the 
inconclusive and usually vapid "communica- 
tions" that are vouchsafed through profes- 
sional mediums, have done much to confirm this 
opinion, and the possibility of apparitions, par- 
ticularly, has been weakened, rather than 
strengthened, in the minds of intelligent persons 
by the machinery of cabinets and other ap- 
pliances which seem to be necessary parapher- 
nalia in "materializing" the spirits of the dead. 

That the departed ever re-appear in such 
form as they presented during life I am not 
prepared to affirm, even in view of many ex- 
periences of a nature like that which I am about 
to relate. In the generality of such cases I 
am decidedly in agreement with the opinion of 

[25] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

the late Wilkie Collins, as set forth in the 
preceding story — although I should be inclined 
to extend that opinion far enough to include 
the admission of the possibility that it was the 
actual Presence which so worked upon the mind 
of the percipient as to cause it to project from 
itself the phantom appearance. This may seem 
somewhat like a quibble to confirmed believers 
in apparitions, of whom there are many, and 
perhaps it is — while those who are impatient 
of ingenious psychological explanations may 
find in the following story a confirmation of the 
conviction which they hold, that the dead may 
appear in the form in which we knew them, 
bringing warning and aid to the living. 

It is now thirty-one years ago that the wife 
of my youth, after less than a year of married 
life, was taken from me by death, leaving to 
me an infant daughter, in whom all the personal 
and mental traits of the mother gradually re- 
produced themselves in a remarkable degree. 
Some three years later I married again, and 
the child, who, during that period, had been 
in the care of her grandparents, at regular in- 
tervals, on either side of the house respectively, 
was taken into the newly-formed home. 

A strong affection between the new mother 

[26] 



"a spirit of health" 

and the little girl was established at once, and 
their relations soon became more like those of 
blood than of adoption. The latter, never 
having known her own mother, had no memory 
of associations that might have weakened the 
influence of the new wife, and the step-mother, 
as the years passed and she had no chil- 
dren, grew to regard the one who had come 
to her at her marriage as in very truth her 
own. 

I often thought, when seeing those two to- 
gether, so fond and devoted each to each, 
that if those we call dead still live and have 
knowledge of facts in the existence they have 
left behind, the mother of the child may have 
felt her natural yearnings satisfied in beholding 
their mutual affection, and even have found 
therein the medium to extend from her own 
sphere the influence of happiness which some 
may believe they see exercised in the events that 
this narrative, as well as others in the series, 
describes. 

At the time in which these events occurred, I 
was traveling in Europe, and my wife and 
daughter were living in Boston, as stated in the 
story with which this book opens. In the ad- 
joining town of Brookline there resided a lady 
of wealth and social prominence, Mrs. John 

[27] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

W. Candler, wife of a gentleman who had large 
railway interests in the South, and who was, 
moreover, Representative for his district in the 
Lower House of Congress. Mrs. Candler was 
a woman of rare beauty and possessed unusual 
intellectual gifts; she was also a close personal 
friend of Mrs. Thaxter, whom I have before 
mentioned and who introduced her to my wife 
— the acquaintance thus formed developing 
into an affectionate intimacy that ended only 
with Mrs. Candler's death, a dozen years ago. 
As her husband's business interests and legis- 
lative duties frequently compelled his absence 
from home, it was Mrs. Candler's delight to 
enliven her enforced solitudes by dispensing her 
large and unostentatious hospitality to her 
chosen friends — so that it often happened that 
Mrs. Thaxter, and my wife and child, were 
guests for considerable periods at her luxurious 
residence. 

One afternoon in mid-winter, Mrs. Candler 
drove into the city to call upon my wife, and, 
finding her suffering from a somewhat obstinate 
cold, urged her, with her usual warmth and 
heartiness, to return home with her for a couple 
of days, for the sake of the superior comforts 
which her house could afford as compared with 
those of the hotel. My wife demurred to this, 
[28] 



' ' A SPIRIT OF HEALTH" 

chiefly on the ground that, as the weather was 
very severe, she did not like to take the child 
with her, since, being rather delicate that 
winter although not actually ill, she dared not 
remove her, even temporarily, from the equable 
temperature of the hotel. 

While the matter was being discussed another 
caller was announced in the person of Miss 
Mae Harris Anson, a young woman of some 
eighteen years, daughter of a wealthy family 
in Minneapolis, who was pursuing a course of 
study at the New England Conservatory of 
Music. Miss Anson was very fond of children, 
and possessed an unusual talent for entertain- 
ing them — and thus was a great favorite of 
my little daughter, who hailed her arrival with 
rapture. This fact furnished Mrs. Candler 
with an idea which she immediately advanced 
in the form of a suggestion that Miss Anson 
might be willing to care for the child during my 
wife's absence. To this proposal Miss Anson 
at once assented, saying, in her lively way, that, 
as her school was then in recess for a few days, 
she would like nothing better than to exchange 
her boarding-house for a hotel for a while, and 
in consideration thereof to act as nursemaid for 
such time as might be required of her. It was 
finally agreed, therefore, that Miss Anson 

[29] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

should come to the hotel the next morning, pre- 
pared for a two or three days' stay; — this she 
did, and early in the afternoon Mrs. Candler 
arrived in her sleigh, and with my wife was 
driven to her home. 

The afternoon and evening passed without 
incident, and my wife retired early to bed, being 
assigned to a room next to Mrs. Candler, and 
one that could be entered only through that 
lady's apartment. The next morning she arose 
rather late, and yielding to the arguments of 
her hostess, who insisted that she should not 
undergo the exertion of going down to break- 
fast, that repast was served in her room, and 
she partook of it while seated in an easy chair at 
a table before an open fire that blazed cheerily 
in the wide chimney-place. The meal finished 
and the table removed, she continued to sit for 
some time in her comfortable chair, being at- 
tired only in dressing-gown and slippers, con- 
sidering whether she should go to bed again, 
as Mrs. Candler had recommended, or prepare 
herself to rejoin her friend, whom she could 
hear talking in the adjoining room with another 
member of the household. 

The room in which she was sitting had a large 
window fronting upon the southeast, and the 

[30] 



*'a spirit of health" 

morning sun, shining from a cloudless sky, 
poured through it a flood of light that stretched 
nearly to her feet, and formed a golden track 
across the carpet. Her eyes wandered from 
one to another object in the luxurious apart- 
ment, and as they returned from one of these 
excursions to a regard of her more immediate 
surroundings, she was startled to perceive that 
some one was with her — one who, standing in 
the full light that came through the window, 
was silently observing her. Some subtle and 
unclassified sense informed her that the figure 
in the sunlight was not of mortal mold — it was 
indistinct in form and outline, and seemed to be 
a part of, rather than separate from, the 
radiance that surrounded it. It was the figure 
of a young and beautiful woman with golden 
hair and blue eyes, and from both face and 
eyes was carried the impression of a great 
anxiety; a robe of some filmy white material 
covered her form from neck to feet, and bare 
arms, extending from flowing sleeves, were 
stretched forth in a gesture of appeal. 

My wife, stricken with a feeling in which 
awe dominated fear, lay back in her chair for 
some moments silently regarding the appari- 
tion, not knowing if she were awake or dream- 
ing. A strange familiarity in the face troubled 

[31] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

her, for she knew she had never seen it before 
— then understanding came to her, and the 
recollection of photographs, and of the features 
of her daughter by adoption, flashed upon her 
mind the instant conviction that she was gazing 
at the mother who died when the child was 
born. 

"What is it?" she finally found strength to 
whisper. "Why do you come to me?" 

The countenance of the apparition took on 
an expression of trouble more acute even than 
before. 

"The child! The child!" — the cry came 
from the shadowy lips distinctly, yet as if 
uttered at a great distance. "Go back to town 
at once I" 

"But why?" my wife inquired. "I do not 
understand what you mean." 

The figure began to fade away, as if reab- 
sorbed in the light that enveloped it, but the 
voice came again as before : — "Go to your room 
and look in your bureau drawer!"— and only 
the sunlight was to be seen in the spot where 
the phantom had stood. 

For some moments my wife remained re- 
clining in her chair, completely overcome by her 
strange vision; then she got upon her feet, and 
half ran, half staggered, into the next room 
[32] 



' * A SPIRIT OF HEALTH" 

where Mrs. Candler and her companion were 
still conversing. 

"Why, my dear!" exclaimed Mrs. Candler, 
"what in the world is the matter? You are as 
pale as a ghost!" 

"I think I have seen one," panted my wife. 
"Tell me, has anyone passed through here into 
my room?" 

"Why, no," her friend replied; "how could 
anyone? We have both been sitting here ever 
since breakfast." 

"Then it is true!" cried my wife. "Some- 
thing terrible is happening in town! Please, 
please take me to my rooms at once !" — and she 
hurriedly related what she had seen. 

Mrs. Candler endeavored to soothe her— 
she had been dreaming; all must be well with 
the child, otherwise Miss Anson would at once 
inform them; — moreover, rather than have 
her brave a ride to town in the bitter cold of 
the morning, she would send a servant after 
luncheon to inquire for news at the hotel. My 
wife was not convinced by these arguments but 
finally yielded to them; Mrs. Candler gave her 
the morning paper as a medium for quieting 
her mind, and she returned with it to her room 
and resumed her seat in the easy chair. 

She had hardly begun her reading, however, 

[33] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

when the newspaper was snatched from her 
hand and thrown to the opposite side of the 
room, and as she started up in alarm she saw 
the apparition again standing in the sunlight, 
and again heard the voice — this time in a tone 
of imperious command — "Go to your rooms at 
once and look in your bureau drawer !" At the 
utterance of these words the apparition van- 
ished, leaving my wife so overwhelmed with 
fear and amazement that for some time she 
was powerless to move — then reason and con- 
trol of action returned to her, and she was able 
to regain her friend's room and acquaint her 
with the facts of this second visitation. This 
time Mrs. Candler made no attempt to oppose 
her earnest purpose to return to town, the 
horses and sleigh were ordered from the 
stables, my wife hurriedly dressed herself, and 
in half an hour both ladies were speeding 
toward Boston. 

When they reached the entrance of the 
hotel, my wife, whose excitement had increased 
greatly during the drive, sprang from the sleigh 
and rushed upstairs, with Mrs. Candler close 
behind her, burst into the door of her rooms 
like a whirlwind, and discovered — the child 
absorbed in architectural pursuits with a set of 
building blocks in the middle of the sitting- 

[34] 



"a spirit of health" 

room, and Miss Anson calmly reading a novel 
in a rocking chair by the window ! 

The picture thus presented was so serene and 
commonplace by comparison with what my 
wife's agitation had led her to expect, that Mrs. 
Candler at once burst out laughing; my wife's 
face also showed intense bewilderment — then, 
crying, "She said 'look in the bureau drawer!' " 
she hurried into the bedroom with Mrs. Cand- 
ler at her heels. 

The bureau, a conventional piece of bedroom 
furniture, stood at the head of the child's bed, 
and presented an entirely innocent appearance ; 
nevertheless my wife went straight up to it, and, 
firmly grasping the handles, pulled out the top- 
most drawer. Instantly a mass of flame burst 
forth, accompanied by a cloud of acrid smoke 
that billowed to the ceiling, and the whole in- 
terior of the bureau seemed to be ablaze. Mrs. 
Candler, with great presence of mind, seized 
a pitcher of water and dashed it upon the fire, 
which action checked it for the moment, and 
Miss Anson flew into the hall, arousing the 
house with her cries. Mrs. Thaxter, who was 
at the moment coming to my wife's apartment 
from her own, hurried in and saw the blazing 
bureau and the two white-faced women before 
it and turned quickly to summon help — em- 

[35] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

ployes came running with an extinguisher, and 
in five minutes the danger was over. 

When the excitement had subsided, an 
examination was made as to the cause of the 
conflagration, with the following result: 

My wife, who was a skilful painter in oils, 
and devoted much of her time to this employ- 
ment, was accustomed to keep her colors and 
brushes in the upper drawer of the bureau in 
her bedroom. She had also, and very care- 
lessly, placed in a corner of the drawer a quan- 
tity of loose rags which had become thoroughly 
saturated with oil and turpentine from their 
use in cleaning her palette and brushes. 

I am indebted for the above facts not only 
to Mrs. Thaxter and Mrs. Candler, both of 
whom I have frequently heard relate this story, 
but, particularly, to Miss Anson herself, who 
has been, at the time of writing this, for several 
years connected with the editorial staff of the 
Minneapolis Journal. In a letter which she 
sent me in response to my request that she 
should confirm my recollection, she set forth 
clearly the causes of the conflagration in the 
following words: 

"Some time before she [my wife] had put 
a whole package of matches into a stewpan, in 
which she heated water, and -set the pan in 

[36] 



OF HEALTH" 



with these paints and rags. Then, one night, 
when in a hurry for some hot water, she had 
gtfne in, in the dark, and forgetting all about 
the matches, had dumped them upon the tubes 
of oil paints when she pulled out the pan. 

"Every one of the heads of these matches 
had been burned off, evidently through spon- 
taneous combustion. I went through them all, 
and not one had been ignited. The rags were 
burned and the whole inside of the drawer was 
charred. The fire could not have been kept 
under longer than the following night, and 
would probably have burned the child and me 
in bed, before anyone dreamed there was a 
fire. n 



[37] 

V " 



>/ C 



THE MIRACLE OF THE FLOWERS 






THE MIRACLE OF THE FLOWERS 

Among the "phenomena" which attend the 
average spiritualistic seance a favorite one is 
the apparent production from space of quan- 
tities of flowers — to the supernatural source 
of which credence or doubt is given according 
to the degree of belief or scepticism inherent 
in the individual sitters. Having never at- 
tended one of these gatherings, I am not able 
to describe such an incident as occurs under 
such auspices; but the suggestion recalls to my 
mind two very remarkable events in which 
flowers were produced in a seemingly inex- 
plicable manner, and without the assistance (if 
that be the right word) of mediumistic control. 
In one of these experiences I personally par- 
ticipated, and in both of them my wife was con- 
cerned — therefore I can vouch for their occur- 
rence. 

Some months after the happenings recorded 
in the two previous narratives, I was spending 
the summer following my return from Europe 
in Northampton, Massachusetts, at the resi- 
dence of my father, having with me my wife 
and daughter. The mother of the child, who, 

[41] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

as I have said, died in giving her birth, was a 
resident of the town at the time of our mar- 
riage, and her body reposed in our family's 
lot in the cemetery. The circumstance of this 
bereavement caused the warmest affections of 
my father and and mother to centre upon my 
daughter, she being then their only grandchild. 

The little girl was passionately fond of flow- 
ers, and her indulgent grandfather, himself a 
zealous horticulturist and grower of choice 
fruits, had that summer allotted to her sole 
use a plot six feet square in his spacious gardens, 
which became the pride of her heart from the 
brilliant array of blooms which she had coaxed 
to grow in it. Her favorite flowers were 
pansies, with the seeds of which she had planted 
nearly one-half of the space at her disposal. 
They had germinated successfully and flourished 
amazingly, and at the time of which I write 
that part of the bed devoted to them was a 
solid mass of pansies of every conceivable 
variety. 

At about four o'clock one afternoon my wife 
and I set out for a walk through the famous 
meadows that stretched away from the back 
of the grounds, and on our return, some two 
hours later, we saw at a distance the child stand- 
ing upon the terrace awaiting us, clean and 

[42] 



THE MIRACLE OF THE FLOWERS 

wholesome in a fresh white frock, and bearing 
a large bouquet of her favorite pansies in her 
hand. As we approached she ran to meet us 
and extended the pansies to my wife, saying: — 
"Mamma, see these lovely pansies ! I have 
picked them for you from my pansy-bed." 

My wife thanked the child and kissed her, 
arid we went upstairs to our room together to 
prepare for supper that was then about to be 
served. A vase stood on the shelf at one side 
of the room, and in this, first partly filling it 
with water, I placed the bunch of pansies. 

After supper I suggested to my wife that we 
should call upon some relatives who lived about 
a quarter of a mile away, and went with her to 
our room while she made her preparations for 
our excursion. While waiting for her I took 
from the shelf the vase containing the pansies, 
and we examined and commented upon them for 
some time; then, her toilette being completed, 
I restored the vase and flowers to their former 
position, and we left the room, and immediately 
thereafter the house, together. 

We found our friends at home and spent a 
pleasant evening with them, leaving on our 
return at about ten o'clock. The night was 
warm and perfectly calm, and, as there was no 

[43] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

moon, the way was dark save where, here and 
there, a street lamp threw about its little circle 
of light. As we turned into the street which 
led to my father's house we passed under a 
row of maple trees whose heavy foliage made 
the darkness even more profound than we had 
known it elsewhere, and beside a high hedge 
which enclosed the spacious grounds of a man- 
sion that stood at the corner of the two high- 
ways. This hedge extended for a distance of 
about fifty yards, and as many feet beyond the 
point where it terminated a lighted street lamp 
dimly illumined the pathway. We were at a 
point about midway of the hedge when my wife, 
who was the nearer to it, suddenly stopped and 
exclaimed: "Was it you that gave that pull 
at my shawl?" and readjusted the garment — a 
light fleecy affair — which I at once observed was 
half off her left shoulder. 

"Why, no," I replied, "I did not touch your 
shawl. What do you mean?" 

"I mean," she answered, "that I felt a hand 
seize my shawl and try to draw it away from 
me." 

I pointed out the fact that I could not well 
have reached her shawl on the side on which 
it had been disarranged, and suggested that it 
might have caught upon a projecting twig; but 

[44] 



THE MIRACLE OF THE FLOWERS 

although she accepted this explanation as 
reasonable she still insisted that she had the 
consciousness of some person having laid a hand 
upon her. 

After a few moments we went on, and had 
left the hedge behind us and were within a few 
feet of the street lamp, when my wife stopped 
a second time, declaring that her shawl had 
been seized again. Sure enough, the garment 
was as before, lying half off her shoulder, and 
this time obviously not because of any project- 
ing twig, since we were in a perfectly clear 
space, and could look about us over an area of 
several yards in every direction. This we did, 
puzzled but not alarmed at the twice-recurring 
incident; then, on a sudden, my wife seized my 
arm with a convulsive grip, and, raising her 
eyes until I thought she was looking at the light 
in the street lamp before us, whispered: 
"Heavens ! Do you see that?' 9 

I followed the direction of her gaze, but 
could see nothing, and told her so, in the same 
breath asking her what she meant. 

"It is Minnie!" she gasped (thus uttering 
the name of my dead wife) "and she has her 
hands full of flowers! Oh, Minnie, Minnie, 
what are you doing?" and hid her face in her 
hands. I clasped her in my arms, thinking she 

[45] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

was about to faint, and gazed fearfully above 
us in a vain effort to discern the declared ap- 
parition — and at the same moment I felt a 
shower of soft objects strike upon my upturned 
face and upon my straw hat, and saw against 
the light before me what seemed like blossoms 
floating downward to the ground. 

As soon as I could quiet my wife's agitation 
and induce her to look again for the appearance 
which she believed she had beheld, but which 
she told me had now vanished, I made a search 
upon the sidewalk for the objects whose fall I 
had both felt and seen. They were plainly evi- 
dent, even in the dim light, and I gathered up 
a number of them and carried them under the 
lamp for examination. They were pansies, 
freshly gathered, and with their leaves and 
stems damp, as if just taken from water. 
Hastening to the house, we went directly to our 
room, and lighting the gas looked eagerly 
toward the shelf where we had left the vase 
filled with pansies some three hours before. The 
vase was there, half-filled with water, but not 
a single flower was standing in it. 

The next day was Sunday and all the family 
went to morning service at the church. As my 
wife and I, with our daughter between us and 

[46] 



THE MIRACLE OF THE FLOWERS 

following my father and mother at some dis- 
tance, reached the scene of our adventure on 
the previous night, we saw lying on the side- 
walk a half-dozen pansies which we had evi- 
dently overlooked, owing to the dim light in 
which we had gathered up the others. At sight 
of them the little girl dropped my hand, to 
which she was clinging, and with a cry of sur- 
prise ran to pick them up. 

"Why," she exclaimed, "how did these come 
here? They are the pansies I picked for 
mamma yesterday from my pansy bed!" 

"Oh, no, dear," I said; "these are probably 
some other pansies ; how can you tell they came 
from your bed?" 

"Why," she replied, "I know every one of 
my pansies, and this one" — holding up a blos- 
som that was of so deep and uniform a purple 
as to appear almost black — "I could tell any- 
where, for there was no other in the bed like 
it." 

So she collected all the scattered flowers and 
insisted on carrying them to church, and on 
returning home they were replaced, with their 
fellows, in the vase from which they had been 
so mysteriously transferred the night before. 

It has been my purpose, in preparing these 

[47] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

stories for publication, not to permit myself to 
be led into any attempt to explain them, or even 
to embellish them with comment, and thus per- 
haps weaken what I desire to present as a plain 
statement of fact — yet this incident of the 
pansies seems to me (although for quite per- 
sonal reasons) so touching, and so tender in 
its suggestions, that I cannot forbear a word 
or two concerning it. In thus indulging myself 
I am aware that the reader may think he finds 
a contradiction of the statement I have made 
in the preface of this book as to my non-com- 
mittal attitude regarding Spiritualism. On this 
point I can only say that while I am not con- 
vinced as to the origin of the phenomenon, I 
should find much comfort if I could with as- 
surance attribute it to a spiritualistic source. 
There are doubtless many who will thus refer 
it, and I write these lines in sympathy, even if 
somewhat doubtingly, with their point of view. 
In every way this event stands unique in my 
experience — in place of its occurrence, and in 
all its circumstances. The town was the scene 
of my youthful wooing — the street one in which 
my fiancee and I had walked and talked a thou- 
sand times on the way between my home and 
hers. To this town, and to this familiar path, 
the new wife had come with me, and with us 

us] 



THE MIRACLE OF THE FLOWERS 

both the child of her love and sacrifice. Is 
there no significance, is there no consolation, not 
only to myself but to others who have been 
bereaved, in this episode? The loving gift of 
flowers to her new guardian by the innocent 
and unconscious child; the approval of the 
offering through its repetition, by the apparent 
spirit of the mother that bore her! — these 
things may mean nothing, yet in me whom they 
approached so nearly they have strengthened 
the hope that lives in every human heart, that 
the flame of our best and purest affections shall 
survive the seeming extinguishment of the 
grave. 

Science, to be sure, has its explanation, and 
in fairness that explanation should be heard. 
To quote an eminent authority who has favored 
me with his views on the subject : — "The power 
that moved the pansies was a psychic force in- 
herent in the human personality [of your wife] 
and exercised without the knowledge or co- 
operation of the objective self." (Dr. John D. 
Quackenbos.) 

In other words, it was not the spirit of the 
dead wife that lifted the pansies and showered 
them upon us, but what we must call, for want 
of a better term, the living wife's "subliminal 
self." The vision that appeared and seemed to 

[49] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

be casting the flowers was a freak of the 
psychical consciousness — there w r as no appari- 
tion save in my wife's overwrought imagination. 

To quote again: "But that does not pre- 
clude the possibility of the levitation of the 
pansies, which levitation was accomplished by 
the lady herself, however ignorant of the opera- 
tion of this psychic force she used objectively. 
The fact that she was thus objectively ignorant 
would be no obstacle to her subjective mind 
using in the objective earth-life her own super- 
sensible attributes and powers." 

The principal objection to this argument 
seems to me to lie in this : — the pansies did not 
first fall upon us, and thus, by suggestion or 
otherwise, so excite my wife's imagination that 
she thought she saw the apparition; the appari- 
tion was first manifest, and the rain of flowers 
followed. That is to say, an appearance of the 
immaterial was followed by a tangible mani- 
festation — there was nothing imaginary about 
that. Had the conditions been reversed, the 
fall of the flowers might very well have excited 
apprehension of the vision — but I cannot see 
where there was any place for fancy in ex- 
perience of this incident. 

The second episode to which I have alluded 
[50] 






THE MIRACLE OF THE FLOWERS 

in the opening paragraph of this narrative oc- 
curred in the following winter, and was, in a 
certain sense, a sequel to the first. Business 
took me from my home in Boston, and during 
my absence my wife and daughter were invited 
by the lady I have already mentioned to spend 
a few days at her house in Brookline. Her hus- 
band was away on one of his frequent business 
trips, leaving with his wife her widowed sister, 
Mrs. Myra Hall, his daughter, a girl of 
eighteen, and a young German lady, Fraulein 
Botha, whose acquaintance the hostess had 
formed abroad, and who at the time was at the 
head of the Department of Instruction in Art 
at Wellesley College. All these were witnesses, 
with my wife, of the remarkable event which I 
am about to describe. 

On the afternoon of the second day of my 
wife's visit, the child became suddenly ill, and 
as evening drew on exhibited rather alarming 
symptoms of fever. A physician was sum- 
moned who prescribed remedies, and directed 
that the patient should be put to bed at once. 
This was done, and at about ten o'clock my 
wife, accompanied by the ladies I have men- 
tioned, went quietly upstairs to observe her con- 
dition before retiring for the night themselves. 
The upper floor was reached by a very broad 

[jfi] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

staircase which branched near the top to give 
access to the chambers upon a wide hall, from 
every part of which one could look down over 
a railing upon the floor below — and the room 
in which the child lay was about half-way 
around this hall on the left-hand side. 

The ladies entered the chamber and the 
hostess turned up the gas, showing the child 
peacefully slumbering and with forehead and 
hands moist with a wholesome perspiration, 
although her face was still somewhat flushed. 
As the night was a bitter cold one in mid-Janu- 
ary, the mistress of the house suggested that 
some additional covering should be placed upon 
the bed, and produced from another room an 
eider-down counterpane, covered with scarlet 
silk, which was carefully arranged without 
waking the sleeper. All then left the room and 
started downstairs again, the hostess being the 
last to go out, after lowering the gas until it 
showed only a point of light. 

They were near the bottom of the staircase 
when my wife suddenly cried out: "Oh, there 
is Minnie ! She passed up the stairs by me, all 
in white, and has gone into the room! Oh, I 
know something dreadful is going to happen!" 
— and she rushed frantically to the upper floor, 

[52] 



THE MIRACLE OF THE FLOWERS 

followed by the others in a body. At the half- 
open door of the child's room they all stopped 
and listened, not daring for the moment to 
enter, but no sound came from within. Then, 
mustering up courage and clinging to each 
others' hands, they went softly in, and the 
hostess turned up the gas. With one accord 
they looked toward the bed, and, half-blinded 
by the sudden glare of the gaslight, could not 
for a moment credit what their eyes showed 
them — that the sleeping child was lying under 
a coverlet, not of scarlet, as they had left her 
hardly a minute before, but of snowy white. 
Recovering from their astonishment, an exami- 
nation revealed the cause of the phenomenon. 
The scarlet eider-down counterpane was in its 
place, but completely covered with pure white 
lilies on long stalks, so spread about and lying 
in such quantities that the surface of the bed 
was hidden under their blooms. By actual 
count there were more than two hundred of 
these rich and beautiful blossoms strewn upon 
the coverlet, representing a moderate fortune 
at that time of year, and probably unprocurable 
though all the conservatories in the city had 
been searched for them. 

They were carefully gathered and placed 
about the house in vases, jugs, and every other 

[53] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

receptacle that could be pressed into service to 
hold them, filling the rooms for several days 
with their fragrance until, like other flowers, 
they faded and died. 



[54] 



THE MIDNIGHT HORSEMAN 



THE MIDNIGHT HORSEMAN 

On a brilliant moonlit evening in August, 
1885, a considerable party of friends and more 
or less intimate acquaintances of the hostess 
assembled at the summer cottage of Mrs. 
Thaxter at Appledore Island, Isles of Shoals. 
Included in the company were the then editor 
of the New York Herald, Rev. Dr. Hepworth, 
— also well known as a prominent divine and 
pulpit orator — two of the leading musicians of 
Boston (Julius Eichberg and Prof. John K. 
Paine) — of whom one occupied a chair in Har- 
vard University, — and, among others, my wife 
and myself. The cottr.ge was the charming 
resort which the visitor would be led to expect 
from the well-known refinement and artistic 
taste of its occupant, and its interior attractions 
might well have been suggested even to the 
casual passer-by who looked upon its wonder- 
ful flower-garden, wherein seeds of every 
variety had in spring been scattered broadcast 
and in profusion, and now, as autumn ap- 
proached, had developed into a jungle of 
blooms of every conceivable color. 

[57] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

We had some music, as I remember, and 
after that an interesting conversation, which, in 
consequence of the many varied and brilliant 
intellects there assembled, took a wide range, 
coming around finally — I do not recall by what 
steps — to occultism, clairvoyance, and the phe- 
nomena of so-called "Spiritualism." In the 
course of the discussion of this topic, the editor 
interested us by a humorous account of some 
recent experiences of his own in "table-tipping" 
and "communications" by rappings — and inci- 
dentally remarked that he believed any assembly 
of persons who wished could experience similar 
phenomena, even though none of them pos- 
sessed what it is usual to describe as "medium- 
istic" powers. Some one else then suggested 
that, as our company seemed to fulfil this con- 
dition, the present might be a favorable time 
to test the theory — whereupon we all pro- 
ceeded to the adjoining dining-room with the 
view of making experiment by means of the 
large dinner table that stood in the middle of 
it. 

(I may here state that although my wife had 
already had some abnormal experiences, only 
Mrs. Thaxter and I were acquainted with the 
fact, and even these had come to her unsought 
in every instance.) 

[58] 



THE MIDNIGHT HORSEMAN 

Somewhat to our disappointment, the table 
failed to show itself susceptible to any "in- 
fluence" other than the law of gravitation, but 
remained insensible and immovable, even 
though we sat about it under approved "con- 
ditions" for half an hour or so — lights lowered, 
and our imposed hands touching each other in 
order to form upon it an uninterrupted "cir- 
cuit." We finally tired of this dull sport, turned 
up the lights, and pushing back our chairs from 
the table, fell into general conversation. 

Hardly had we done so, when my wife sud- 
denly exclaimed: — "How strange! Why, the 
wall of the room seems to have been removed, 
and I can see rocks and the sea, and the moon- 
light shining upon them!" At this interrup- 
tion our talk naturally ceased abruptly, and one 
of us asked her to describe more in detail what 
was visible to her. 

"It is growing stranger still," she replied. 
"I do not see the sea any more. I see a long, 
straight road, with great trees like elms here 
and there on the side of it, and casting dark 
shadows across it. There are no trees like those 
and no such road near here, and I cannot under- 
stand it. .There is a man standing in the middle 
of the road, in the shadow of one of the trees. 
Now he is coming toward me and I can see his 

[59] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

face in the moonlight. Why ! it is John Weiss I" 
(naming the Liberal clergyman and writer 
whom most of us had known in Boston, and 
who had died some five or six years before) 
"Why, is that you? What are you doing here, 
and what does this mean? He smiles, but does 
not speak. Now he has turned and gone back 
into the shadow of the tree again." 

After a few moments' pause: — "Now I can 
see something coming along the road some 
distance away. It is a man on horseback. He 
is riding slowly, and he has his head bent and 
a slouch hat over his eyes, so that I cannot see 
his face. Now John Weiss steps out of the 
shadow into the moonlight; the horse sees him 
and stops — he rears up in the air and whirls 
about and begins to run back in the direction 
from which he came. The man on his back 
pulls him up, lashes him with his whip, turns 
him around, and tries to make him go forward. 
The horse is terrified and backs again, trying 
to break away from his rider; the man strikes 
him again, but he will not advance. 

"The man dismounts and tries to lead the 
horse, looking about to see what he is fright- 
ened at. I can see his face now very clearly — 
I should know him anywhere ! John Weiss is 
walking toward him, but the man does not see 

[60] 



THE MIDNIGHT HORSEMAN 

him. The horse does, though, and plunges and 
struggles, but the man in strong and holds him 
fast. Now John Weiss is so close to the man 
that he must see him. Oh! Oh! he does see 
him, and is horribly frightened ! He steps back 
but John Weiss does not follow — only points 
his hand at him. The man jumps on his horse 
and beats him fiercely with his whip, and the 
two fly back down the road and disappear in 
the distance. Tell me, John Weiss, what it 
all means? He smiles again and shakes his 
head — now he is gone, too; I can see nothing 
more." 

We were all profoundly impressed by this 
graphic recital and spent some time discussing 
what possible meaning the strange vision could 
have; but we were compelled to abandon all 
efforts to elucidate it, and it was not until some 
seven months later that the sequel to the mystery 
was furnished — a sequel that for the moment 
seemed about to offer an explanation, but, if 
anything, beclouded the matter even more 
deeply than before. 

Early in March of the following year a party 
of eight or ten persons was dining at the house 
of Mrs. Candler, in Brookline, already men- 
tioned in this series, and after dinner went up to 
the sitting-room of the hostess, upon the second 
[61] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

floor. The weather for a week previous had 
been warm and spring-like, but on the day in 
question a heavy snowstorm had been raging, 
which cleared at nightfall, leaving a foot or so 
of snow upon the ground. Of the dinner-party 
only my wife and I had been at the Isles of 
Shoals the previous summer when the incident 
above narrated had occurred; — but all present 
were acquainted with the circumstance, which 
had been a frequent subject of conversation 
among us at our frequent gatherings at one 
another's houses during the autumn and 
winter that had followed. 

As I sat near the door and let my eye wander 
about the apartment, I idly noticed, among the 
many souvenirs of foreign travel which it con- 
tained, two Japanese vases set upon brackets 
in opposite corners, and about six feet from the 
floor. These vases were, perhaps, twenty feet 
apart — the width of the room. The vase on 
the bracket at my right was empty, while the 
other contained a bunch of "pussy-willows," 
which attracted my attention as the usual season 
for these growths had not arrived. I com- 
mented upon this circumstance to my hostess, 
who replied: — r 'Yes, it is very early for them, 
is it not? I was driving yesterday, and was 
surprised to see a willow-tree bearing those 

[62] 



THE MIDNIGHT HORSEMAN 

'pussies 1 in a sheltered spot beside Jamaica 
Pond. I had the footman get down and gather 
them, and when I reached home I put them in 
that vase." 

This remark, of course, drew all eyes to the 
bracket bearing the vase filled with the "pussies" 
— which, thereupon and at the instant, disap- 
peared, leaving the vase in its place, but quite 
empty; a soft thud was heard as two or three 
of the stalks fell upon the carpet midway be- 
tween the two brackets, and a rustling sound in 
the right-hand corner attracted the attention of 
all present to the singular fact that the "pussies" 
were now standing in the vase on the second 
bracket as quietly as if they had been there at 
the outset. 

It is to be noted that no one in the room was 
within a dozen feet of either of the two vases, 
and that neither of them could be reached by 
anyone who did not stand upon a chair for the 
purpose. Moreover, the room was brilliantly 
illuminated by several gas-jets. We had been 
accustomed to singular happenings in this par- 
ticular house, and consequently were amused 
rather than startled by the whimsical nature of 
this one. In discussing it some one suggested 
that peculiar influences seemed to be about, and 
it was agreed to invite them to further mani- 

[63] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

festations if possible. Consequently the centre 
of the room was cleared and a large, table 
moved into it — around which, after locking the 
door that led into the hall, and extinguishing 
all the lights but one (which also was turned 
down to a faint glimmer), we drew up our 
chairs and awaited developments. A half-hour 
passed without anything whatever happening — 
whereupon, deciding that conditions were un- 
favorable, we relighted all the gas-jets and fell 
into general conversation, although leaving the 
table still in its position in the middle of the 
room. 

In a few minutes our hostess said: — "Oh, by 
the way, I want you to see the new decorations 
I have had placed in my daughter's room. You 
know it is her birthday" — in fact, I believe that 
evening's dinner party was in honor of the event 
— "and I have had her room entirely refitted, 
since she is no longer a girl, but a young lady." 

So, following her lead, we all trooped away 
to inspect the new arrangement. In doing so 
we passed down the hall for a distance of some 
fifty feet, and entered the room in question, 
which was at the front of the house and over- 
looked its extensive grounds. The apartment 
was decorated with all the luxury and display 
of taste that large means and the command of 

[6 4 ] 



THE MIDNIGHT HORSEMAN 

expert skill could provide, and we spent some 
time in examination of its rich and beautiful 
details. 

One item that particularly attracted our at- 
tention was a small but very heavy clock that 
stood on the mantelpiece, its case of Japanese 
carved bronze, and its interior mechanism 
giving forth a very peculiarly musical and rapid 
"tick-tock, tick-tock" as its short pendulum 
swung to and fro. It was, in fact, a unique and 
curious ornament, and all the members of the 
party admiringly examined it — for my own 
part, I was so struck with its rare character that 
I stood regarding it after the others had left the 
room, and turned from it only when our hostess, 
who alone remained, playfully inquired if I in- 
tended to study the clock all night, and, ex- 
tinguishing the light, passed out into the hall 
with me. 

Returning to the sitting-room, we decided to 
make some further experiment, and, again 
extinguishing the lights and relocking the door 
leading into the hall, seated ourselves around 
the table as before. We had not been in this 
position more than a few minutes when there 
came a tremendous thump upon the table, like 
the fall of some heavy object. Being nearest 
to the lowered gas-jet which gave the only light 

[65] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

to the room, I jumped up and turned it on to 
its full capacity- — whereupon everyone present 
saw standing, in the exact centre of the table, 
its "tick-tock, tick-tock" ringing out sonorously, 
the carved bronze clock which we had so re- 
cently inspected in the distant bedchamber, and 
which had been passed in some mysterious 
fashion along fifty feet of hall space, and 
through a shut and locked door, to astonish us 
by its present appearance. 

Forming ourselves into a committee of the 
whole, we carried the clock back to its former 
place, which, it need not be said, we found 
unoccupied — then returned to the sitting-room, 
where, with lowered lights, we discussed the 
strange occurrences of the evening. Although 
curious to see if any other manifestations would 
occur, we made no effort to invite them beyond 
dimming the lights, and as we found the room 
had become rather warm and close, we opened 
the door into the hall for the sake of better 
ventilation. The hall was only partially 
lighted, but objects in it were easily visible in 
comparison with the almost total darkness that 
shrouded the sitting-room. Our talk was of 
ghosts and of other subjects uncanny to the un- 
initiated, and might have seemed unpleasantly 
[66] 



THE MIDNIGHT HORSEMAN 

interesting to anyone listening to it from the 
hall — as we were afterward led to believe was 
the case. 

Directly facing the open door, and the only 
one of the company so seated, was my wife — 
who suddenly startled us all by springing to 
her feet and crying out : — "There he is ! There 
is the man I saw at the Isles of Shoals last 
summer!" 

"What is it?" we inquired; "an apparition?" 

"No, no !" she exclaimed; "it is a living man ! 
I saw him look around the edge of the door 
and immediately draw back again ! He is here 
to rob the house! Stop him! Stop him!" — 
and she rushed out into the hall with the whole 
company in pursuit. The servants, who by this 
time had gone to bed, were aroused and set to 
work to examine the lower floors, while we 
above searched every room, but in each case 
without result. 

Next to the sitting-room was a large apart- 
ment some thirty feet long by twenty wide, 
which was used for dancing parties, and dinners 
on occasions when many guests were invited. 
It was at the time unfurnished, except, I be- 
lieve, that a few chairs were scattered about 
it, and along one side was a row of several 
windows, before which hung heavy crimson 

[67] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

draperies that completely covered them. We 
lighted the gas in this room, but a glance was 
sufficient to show that it was unoccupied and 
afforded no possible place of concealment. I 
passed through it, however, and, as I did so, 
felt a current of cold air, which I immediately- 
traced, by the swaying of one of the heavy 
curtains, to a window which its folds covered. 
Going up to the drapery and drawing it 
aside, I saw that the window behind it was half 
open, and on the sill and the stone coping out- 
side I perceived, in the several inches of snow 
that covered both, marks which showed the pas- 
sage of what was evidently a human body. 
Reaching nearly to the window was the slant- 
ing roof, formed by heavy plate glass, of the 
conservatory, which opened from the dining- 
room on the lower floor — and in the snow which 
covered this was a furrow which indicated that 
someone had by this means allowed himself to 
slide from the second story to the ground. 
Further investigation below showed, by the 
tell-tale marks in the snow, that the person who 
had thus escaped from the house, and who, after 
gliding down the glass roof of the conservatory, 
had fallen sprawling under it, had lost no time 
in picking himself up, and making good his es- 
cape. The footsteps of a man running with 
[68] 



THE MIDNIGHT HORSEMAN 

long strides were traced through the grounds 
to the street, two hundred yards away, where 
they were lost in the confused tracks of the 
public highway — and from that time to the 
present the mystery has remained unsolved. 



[6 9 ] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

Prefatory Note 

The annals of crime contain few chapters 
more lurid than those contributed to them by 
the record of Frederick Bailey Deeming, who 
suffered the extreme penalty of the law on the 
scaffold of the Melbourne (Victoria, Au- 
stralia) jail on the morning of the twenty-third 
of May, in the year one thousasnd, eight hun- 
dred and ninety-two. 

The details of his misdeeds, his trial, and 
his punishment were set forth by me at the 
time in letters to the New York Times and the 
Boston Journal — of which, as well as of several 
other publications, I was accredited correspon- 
dent during several years of residence and 
travel in Australasia and the South Seas. 

In the narrative that follows, so far as it 
describes atrocities which shocked the whole 
English-speaking world, I have endeavored to 
subordinate particulars in the presentation of 
a general effect; my purpose has been, not to 
picture horrors, but to suggest the strange and 
abnormal personality that lay behind them. 

[73] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

In regard to the peculiar manifestations 
which followed the criminal's execution, and 
for which some undefined influence that sur- 
vived his physical extinction seemed, in part at 
least, to be responsible, I can advance no 
opinion. 



[74] 



CHAPTER I 

THE CONDEMNED 

When I called upon the Colonial Secretary, 
in the Government Offices at Melbourne, with 
a request that I might be allowed to visit the 
prisoner as he lay in jail awaiting execution, 
I was informed that such permission was con- 
trary to all precedent. 

I had sat directly under the eye of the culprit 
four weary days while the evidence accumulated 
that should take away his life. I had watched 
his varied changes of expression as the tide of 
testimony ebbed and flowed, and finally swelled 
up and overwhelmed him. I had heard against 
him the verdict of "the twelve good men and 
true" who had sat so long as arbiters of his 
fate, and the words of the judge condemning 
him to "be hanged by the neck until he was 
dead," and commending his soul to the mercy 
of a God who seemed far aloof from the scheme 
of human iustice so long and so laboriously 
planned. 

Short shrift had been allowed him. Con- 
demned and sentenced on a Monday, the date 

[75] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

for his act of expiation had been set for the 
early morning of the Monday then a scant 
three weeks away;* an appeal for a respite 
had been quickly and formally made, and as 
quickly and formally disallowed; the days 
granted for preparation had glided by with 
portentous speed, and now but five remained 
between him and his introduction to the gallows 
and the cord. 

As a special and gruesome favor I had re- 
ceived one of the few cards issued for the 
execution; and it was perhaps due as much to 
this fact as to that of my newspaper connections 
(as already stated) that the Colonial Secre- 
tary finally consented to waive in my interest 
the usual rule of exclusion, and handed me his 
order for my admission to the jail. I cannot 
confess to any high exultation when the man- 
date of the Secretary, bravely stamped with the 
Great Seal of the Colony of Victoria, was 
placed in my hands — particularly as it was ac- 

♦This is in accordance with the terms of the English 
law in capital cases: — whereby a condemned prisoner is 
allowed two Sundays to live after the pronouncement of 
his sentence, and is executed on the morning following 
the second. Thus Deeming had the longest respite possible 
under the statute — twenty days. The shortest lease of 
life (fifteen days) would be allowed to a prisoner who 
had been sentenced on Saturday. 

[76] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

companied by a strict injunction that no 
public account should be given of the inter- 
view. 

"At least," said the Colonial Secretary, "not 
at present. The trial has been so sensational, 
the crimes traced home to this unhappy man 
so atrocious, that popular feeling has risen to 
such a pitch as to make it desirable to add 
thereto no new occasion of excitement. More- 
over, I have refused many requests similar to 
yours from the local newspapers; you may 
imagine the position I should find myself in if 
it became known that I had discriminated in 
favor of a foreign journalist — therefore I rely 
upon your discretion." 

Thus the Colonial Secretary — in considera- 
tion of whose injunction I made no professional 
use of my opportunity at the time, and report 
upon it now only because of its relation to this 
present record of events. Not that I asseverate 
the existence of such a relation, or theorize upon 
it even if it were,* for the sake of argument, 
accepted as containing the nucleus of a mystery 
that, after many years of consideration, re- 
mains a mystery still. 

I was not alone in my visit to the condemned 
cell in which, heavily ironed and guarded day 
and night by the death-watch, Frederick Bailey 

[77] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

Deeming awaited his doom.* My wife, who 
was included in the warrant from the Colonial 
Secretary, accompanied me; she who had been 
my companion in journeys that had taken me 
twice around the globe, and who had shared 
with me many of the inexplicable experiences 
to which I have alluded in my "Preface;" and 
who, seeming throughout her life more sensitive 
than most of us to occult forces that at times 
appear to be in operation about us, has since 
crossed the frontier of the Undiscovered Coun- 
try, there to find, perhaps, solution of some of 
the riddles that have perplexed both her and 
me. Intensely human as she was, and in all 
things womanly, her susceptibility to weird and 
uncomprehended influences must always seem 
a contradiction — and the more so since they 
always came upon her not only without invita- 
tion, but even in opposition to a will of unusual 
force and sanity, which, until the incidents oc- 
curred that I am about to relate, kept them 
measurably in control. 

♦This was the murderer's real name, as disclosed by- 
investigations in England among relatives and acquaint- 
ances living there. His execution was, as the warrant 
for it recited, "upon the body of Albert Williams," this 
being the alias under which he came to Australia, as 
described later. 

[78] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

A memento of my interview with the mur- 
derer stands before me on the table as I write : 
— a memento also of my wife's skill in model- 
ing, on account of which I had with difficulty 
induced her to be my companion on my sinister 
errand — an impression in plaster of his right 
hand; the hand against which had been proved 
the "deep damnation of the taking-off" of two 
women and four children, and in whose lines 
thus preserved those learned in such matters 
profess to discern the record of other like 
crimes that have been suspected of him, but 
could not be confirmed. I will not weary the 
reader with the histories that have been read 
to me from this grisly document, and no one 
now may ever know whether they be true or 
false: — at all events the hand that made this 
impress was duly found guilty of the atrocities 
I have recorded against it, and the price that 
was exacted for them will seem to none ex- 
cessive, and to some a world too small. 

I remember being much struck at the time 
with the interest which the condemned man 
manifested in assisting me to secure the record. 
My warrant from the Colonial Secretary in- 
cluded permission to obtain it, and the consent 
of the prisoner followed promptly on the ask- 
ing. It came, in fact, with a sort of feverish 

t79] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

readiness, and I fancied that his mind found in 
the operation some brief respite from the 
thoughts that his position, and the swift ap- 
proach of his fate, forced upon him. He 
regarded with intentness the moistening of the 
plaster, and its manipulation into the proper 
degree of consistency; followed intelligently 
the instruction to lay his hand with even pres- 
sure upon the yielding mass, and when the cast 
had hardened, and was passed through the bars 
for his inspection, he examined it with an ap- 
pearance of the liveliest satisfaction. 

"Do those lines mean anything ?" he asked. 

"Many think so," I replied, "and even pro- 
fess to read a record from them. For myself, 
I am ignorant of the art." 

"I have heard of that," he returned. "They 
call it 'palmistry,' don't they? I wish you could 
find out whether they are going to hang me next 
Monday. But they'll do that, right enough. 
I'm thirty-nine now, and my mother always said 
I would die before forty. She died a good 
while ago — but she keeps coming back. She 
comes every night, and of late she comes in 
the daytime, too. What does she bother me 
so for? Why can't she leave me alone?" 
(glancing over his shoulder.) "She's here now 
— over there in the corner. You can't see her? 
[80] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

That's queer. Can't you see her?" — address- 
ing the governor of the jail, who accompanied 
me, and who shook his head to the question. 
"I thought perhaps you could. But you don't 
miss much. She ain't pretty to look at, crying 
all the time and wringing her hands, and saying 
I'm bound to be hanged! I don't mind her so 
much in the daylight, but coming every night 
at two o'clock, and waking me up and torment- 
ing me! — that's what I can't stand." 

u Is this insanity?" I asked the governor as 
I came away. 

"I don't know what it is," he replied. ''We 
all thought at first it was shamming crazy, and 
the government sent in a lot of doctors to 
examine him; but he seemed sane enough when 
they talked with him — the only thing out about 
him was when he complained of his mother's 
visits; just as he did to you. And it is cer- 
tainly true that he has a sort of lit about two 
o'clock every morning, and wakes up screaming 
and crying out that his mother is in the cell 
w T ith him; and talks in a frightful, blood- 
curdling way to someone that nobody can see, 
and scares the death-watch half out of their 
wits. Insanity, hallucination, or an uneasy 
conscience — it might be any of them; I can't 
say. Whatever it is, it seems strange that he 
[81] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

always talks about visitations from his mother, 
who, as far as I can learn, died quietly in her 
bed, and never of apparitions of his two wives 
and four children whose throats he cut with a 
knife held in the hand whose print you've got 
there under your arm. Perhaps you won't mind 
my saying it — but it strikes me you've got a 
queer taste for curiosities. I wouldn't be able 
to sleep with that thing in the house." 

I laughed at the worthy governor's com- 
ment; yet, as it turned out, his words were preg- 
nant with prophecy. 



[82] 



CHAPTER II 

THE CRIME 

In the month of March, eighteen hundred 
and ninety-two, the people of Melbourne were 
startled by glaring headlines in the morning 
newspapers announcing the discovery of a mur- 
der in the suburb of l^idsor. 

During the historic ^Koom" that started into 
life all manner of activities in and about the 
Victorian capital during the middle and later 
"eighties," a great stimulus to building opera- 
tions had been felt, not only in the city itself, 
but also through all the extensive district out- 
lying it. The suburb of Windsor enjoyed its 
share in this evidence of prosperity, and san- 
guine speculators, viewing through the glasses 
of a happy optimism a rush of new inhabitants 
to the fortunate city, erected in gleeful haste 
a multitude of dwellings for their purchase and 
occupancy. New streets were laid out across 
the former barren stretches of the suburb, and 
lined on either side by "semi-detached villas ,, — 
imposing as to name, but generally more or 
less "jerry-built," and exceedingly modest in 

[83] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

their aspect.* These structures were of what 
we might now call a standardized pattern — 
housing two families side by side with a divid- 
ing partition between them, and of a single 
story, with an attic above. Between each two 
connected dwellings (which were fronted by a 
shallow veranda, and contained three or four 
rooms for each resident family) ran a narrow 
alley, hardly wide enough for a real separation 
between one building and the next, but suffi- 
ciently so to justify the description of "semi- 
detached" which their inventor, by a happy in- 
spiration, had applied to them. 

The "Great Melbourne Boom" — as I believe 
it is still referred to as distinguishing it from 
all other "booms," of various dimensions, which 
preceded or have followed it — spent its force, 

♦This activity in building (which is still seen in con- 
crete form in the palatial Parliament Buildings and other 
costly structures of Melbourne) was largely inspired by 
the published calculations of an enthusiastic statistician 
on the future growth of the Colonies : — which were, in 
effect, that by 1951 their population would be thirty-two 
millions, and by 2001, one hundred and eighty-nine mil- 
lions! — some eighty per cent in excess of that of the 
United States at present. It speaks loudly for Australian 
enterprise that these Windsor builders, as well as many 
others, took such prompt measures to provide for this 
increase. 

[84] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

unfortunately, before the hopes of the specu- 
lators who had ridden into Windsor on its 
flood had been realized; and amid the wreck 
and flotsam that remained to mark its ebb, 
some mournful miles of these "semi-detached 
villas" were conspicuous. 

So complete was the disaster that many of 
the owners of these properties paid no further 
heed to them: — and it was with an emotion 
akin to surprise that, on a day in the month 
and year above mentioned, the agent of a cer- 
tain house in Andrew street received a visit 
from a woman with a view to renting it. Why 
the prospective tenant should have selected this 
particular "villa" out of the scores of others 
precisely like it that lined both sides of this 
street, is not known — nor might she herself 
have had any definite reason for her choice. 
Perhaps it was Chance; perhaps Providence — 
the ferms are possibly synonymous : — but at all 
events her action proved to be the first and 
most important of the threads that wove them- 
selves together in a net to entrap, and bring 
to justice, one of the craftiest and most relent- 
less murderers of the age. 

The agent, apprised by his visitor of her 
desire to examine the house, eagerly prepared 
to accompany her, but could not find the key. 
[85] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

A search among his records followed; from 
which the fact resulted that, in the previous 
December, he had rented the house to a gen- 
tlemanly stranger, who, in lieu of affording 
references, had established confidence by pay- 
ing three months' rent in advance. In the 
prevailing depression of the local real estate 
business the agent had given so little attention 
to his lines of empty properties that he had not 
since even visited the house in question — the 
more so as the period for which payment had 
been made was not yet expired. Assured by 
his visitor, however, that the house was cer- 
tainly unoccupied, he went with her to the door, 
which he opened with a master-key with which 
he had equipped himself. 

The house was in good order throughout — 
in fact it seemed never to have been occupied. 
The prospective tenant inspected it carefully 
and with approval, and could discover but one 
objection; she was sure she noticed a disagree- 
able odor in the parlor. Her companion (as is 
natural to agents with a house to dispose of) 
failed to detect this : — if it existed it was doubt- 
less due to the fact that the house had been 
closed for some time; he would have it thor- 
oughly aired and overhaul the drains— -after 
which she could call again. This she agreed to 
[86] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

do, gave the agent her name and address, and 
departed. 

Left to himself, the agent began an investiga- 
tion. With, senses quickened, perhaps, by the 
favorable prospect of business, he became aware 
that the atmosphere of the parlor was un- 
doubtedly oppressive; and as he moved about 
in search of the cause he observed that near 
the open fire-place it was positively sickening. 
Examining this feature of the room more care- 
fully, he discovered that the hearth-stone had 
been forced up at one end, cracking and 
crumbling the cement in which it had been set, 
and from the inch-wide aperture thus formed 
came forth a stench so overpowering that he 
recoiled in horror, and gasping and strangling, 
staggered into the open air. 

The police authorities were notified, and a 
mason was sent for with his tools. The hearth- 
stone was wrenched from its place, and in the 
hollow space beneath, encased in cement, knees 
trussed up to chin and bound with cords, lay the 
body of a young woman — nude save for the 
mantle of luxuriant dark hair that partly 
shrouded her, and with her throat cut from 
ear to ear. 

About a week before Christmas of the pre- 

[87] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

vious year, the North German Lloyd S. S. 
"Kaiser Wilhelm II." from Bremen to Ply- 
mouth via the Suez Canal and Colombo, de- 
barked its passengers at the port of Melbourne. 
Among the second-class contingent who had 
taken ship at Plymouth were "Albert Williams" 
and his wife Emily. They had not been long 
married, and their destination was understood 
by their fellow-passengers to be Colombo; but 
on reaching that port they remained on board 
and continued to Melbourne. It was remarked 
that Mrs. Williams, who up to that time had 
been the life of the company, fell thereafter 
under increasing fits of uneasiness and melan- 
choly — until, at the time of arrival at Mel- 
bourne, she had drawn so far aloof from her 
former friends of the passage that none con- 
cerned themselves regarding her plans, or even 
final destination, in the new land.* 

* This woman (nee Emily Lydia Mather) was the 
daughter of John and Dove Mather, respected residents 
of Rainhill, a small town near Liverpool, England. To 
this town came Deeming, under his alias of "Williams," 
representing himself as an officer in the Indian army who 
had been sent to England to purchase supplies therefor. 
This claim he strengthened by occasionally appearing in 
a resplendent uniform — which seems to have been of his 
own invention — and reciting his many exploits "in the 
imminent deadly breach;" confirming also his free asser- 

[88] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

tions of the possession of large wealth of his own by 
liberal expenditures in all directions. No such splendid 
personage had ever before been seen in quiet Rainhill, 
and the whole town succumbed to the glamor of it — in- 
cluding Miss Mather and her parents, whose acquaintance 
the fascinating officer somehow made, and followed up 
by a respectful but ardent courtship of the daughter. An 
engagement between the pair was soon announced and 
a valuable diamond ring, as well as other gifts of jewelry 
and rich attire, was bestowed by the prospective bride- 
groom upon the bride-to-be: — and although the celebra- 
tion of the wedding was announced for so early a date 
as to cause some unfavorable gossip, the fact was con- 
doned in view of the military necessity of a speedy 
return to India. 

At this point Williams — to use the name by which he 
was then known — encountered what to any less bold and 
unscrupulous villain would have been a decided check: — 
this in the form of a letter from his then living legal 
wife, whom, with his four children by her, he had some 
time before deserted, and who — in some manner unknown 
— had now traced him to Rainhill. This letter, it is 
believed, announced her intention of descending upon him : 
— at any rate, with characteristic audacity, he gave out 
the information that his sister and her children were 
coming to live in Rainhill, and that he had received a 
letter asking him to rent a house for them. He secured 
a house accordingly; but expressed dissatisfaction with 
the somewhat worn wooden floor of the kitchen — and as 
the owner demurred to undertake the expense of a cement 
floor, Williams said he knew about such things, and 
would do the job himself, and ordered the necessary ma- 
terials and tools. When, and by what means, the woman 
and children arrived in Rainhill, seems to be somewhat 
of a mystery: — that they did arrive is shown by the fact 
that after the Windsor murder had come to light, and 

[89] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

the identity of the victim was discovered by a curious 
chain of circumstances too long to find place in this nar- 
rative, the skilfully-laid cement floor with which the old 
wooden floor had been replaced was torn up, and the 
half-decapitated bodies of the five were found embedded 
in it. Those who are curious in such matters may see 
this tragedy depicted at Madame Toussaud's, London. 

No such change, however, was noted in the 
demeanor of her husband. He was well to 
the fore in all the interests and amusements 
that offer themselves on shipboard, rallied his 
wife in no very refined or considerate terms 
upon her growing depression, and devoted most 
of his spare time to a pet canary, which he had 
brought aboard in an elaborate gilt cage; keep- 
ing it constantly near him on deck by day, and 
at night sharing with it his stateroom.* 

A month's association with him had not in- 
creased the liking of his fellow-voyagers. The 
compulsory intimacies engendered by a long 
journey by sea afford a trying test of character, 
and to it the temperament of the so-called 

*This detail — of a murderer carrying about with him 
a canary as a companion — is effectively employed by the 
late Frank Norris in his California novel, "McTeague." 
As that story was published in 1903. eleven years after 
the execution of Deeming, — he, like McTeague, a wife- 
murderer, — the source of Norris' idea would seem 
obvious. 

[90] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

Albert Williams failed satisfactorily to respond. 
Strange and contradictory moods were noticed 
in him. At times he was morose and "grouchy," 
at times feverishly jovial and even hilarious, 
and the transition from one to the other of 
these states of mind was often startlingly 
abrupt. He seems, indeed, to have "got on the 
nerves" of all his associates on the voyage — 
and so at length it happened that when he went 
ashore, carrying the cage and canary solicitously 
in his hand and followed by his silent and sad- 
faced wife, both passengers and officers were at 
one in the aspiration that they might never see 
his sort again. 

Repairing to a "Coffee-Palace" — by which 
sounding title temperance hotels in Australia 
are identified — the couple spent some days in 
its respectable retirement; then their belongings 
were entrusted to a carrying-company, and were 
by it conveyed to the "semi-detached villa" in 
Windsor. The canary, chirping and fluttering 
joyously in its cage, which was promptly hung 
in the veranda, excited for several days the mild 
interest of the neighbors and a few casual 
passers-by — but of the people in the house very 
little was seen. Now and then a gentleman in 
smoking-jacket and embroidered velvet cap was 
observed in the veranda, feeding and chirruping 

[91] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

to the canary, but his companion seems to have 
kept herself in complete seclusion. Her mur- 
der may, indeed, have followed swiftly upon 
her entrance into the house ; however that may 
be, some ten days later the canary was no longer 
seen in the veranda, a carrier came with his 
cart and took away a quantity of trunks and 
boxes, and as he deliberately drove away his 
employer kept pace with him on the sidewalk, 
jauntily swinging the cage with its feathered 
occupant in his hand. 

The trunks and boxes were taken to an auc- 
tion-room in Melbourne, where, after due ad- 
vertisement, their contents were offered for 
public sale ; women's garments and jewelry, for 
the most part, and heterogeneous odds and 
ends. The owner of these properties was pres- 
ent when the sale took place, and seemed much 
interested in their disposition: — but when the 
canary and its cage were offered he suddenly 
declared that he would not sell them, and when 
the auction closed took them away with him. 
He subsequently appeared in the town of Sale, 
several hundred miles away, and at other remote 
localities — perhaps with the idea of misleading 
possible pursuit or for some other purpose un- 
known : — but in all his wanderings he took the 
canary with him, and by his devotion to it at- 

[92] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

tracted an attention to himself which had much 
to do with his identification when he was finally- 
apprehended. 

Returning to Melbourne, where he had 
before assumed the new alias of "Baron Swan- 
ston," he finally disposed of the cage and the 
canary to the auctioneer of his former acquaint- 
ance. Then he disappeared as completely as 
though the earth had opened and engulfed him 
— his crime successfully committed and unsus- 
pected, his very name unknown, his tracks as 
completely covered as was the nearly decapi- 
tated body of his victim beneath the cemented 
hearthstone of the house at Windsor. 

But even then the mysterious power of 
Chance — or Providence — was at work to his 
undoing. A peculiarity of many Australian 
dwellings — a peculiarity which the hastily-con- 
structed "villas" in Windsor shared — is found 
in the fact that they have no cellars. This 
assists the work of rapid building, so important 
when a "boom" is on: — so the ground upon 
their sites had simply been levelled, a surface 
of cement laid, and the buildings set above it 
upon a layer of beams and brickwork. Nothing 
could be easier, under such a principle of con- 
struction, than to remove the hearth-stone, dig 
a grave under it through the thin layer of 

[93] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

cement and into the soil below, conceal the 
body therein, restore the earth to its place, 
and fix the stone in position again. 

What emotion the murderer may have felt 
when, after excavating under the cement to the 
depth of about eighteen inches, his tools struck 
upon solid rock, and he could dig no further, 
may be left to the imagination. Perhaps he 
felt no emotion whatever, not appreciating the 
fatal nature of this check to his plans. At all 
events he had no choice but to accept the situa- 
tion, crowd the body into the shallow space, 
and by pouring cement about it and the cover- 
ing hearth-stone insure the lasting secrecy of 
the crime. He may have been ignorant, too, of 
the enormous expansive power of the gases 
released by decomposition, which under ordi- 
nal*}' conditions might have been absorbed by 
the covering and underlying soil : — here, how- 
ever, with solid rock below, they struggled in 
their close confinement until their barrier at 
its weakest point gave way, and forcing up the 
hearth-stone disclosed to the world the horror 
that it had concealed. 

And here is the strangest circumstance of 
all. Although it had been known to a few sur- 
veyors and builders, and to certain owners of 
buildings that had been erected, that a large 

[94] 



THE HAUNTED B U X G A L 

part of ti irb was built 

:d upon a rock formation, examinations 
that were made subsequent to the discovery of 
the murder showed that at no point did this 
impenetrable foundation approach nearly to the 
surface of the soil, save under this partic 
house of the tragedy ! Age : - : :. : ? 

of stone had been laid down — and ro the dwell- 
ing fortuitously built upon it, with hundrc 
others lying empty about it for him :? choose. 
the murderer had been guided across fifteen 
thousand miles of sea, there to prepare for 
self detection not only for one crime, but for 
the other even more heinous which had so 
briefly preceded it. 



[9.0 



CHAPTER III 

THE FLIGHT AND CAPTURE 

Prominent among the many commonplaces 
current among men is the one that "truth is 
stranger than fiction," and the other that Life, 
in building up her dreams, employs "situations" 
which the boldest playwright would hesitate to 
present upon the stage. Yet the lines that Life 
lays down for her productions are, in the main, 
closely followed by those who are ranked as 
among the world's greatest dramatists. She, 
like them, leads up to a climax by a mass of 
incidents that may severally be trivial, but com- 
bine together with tremendous weight; she fol- 
lows farce with tragedy, and lightens tragedy 
with comedy; she brings her heroes in touch 
with clowns, her lovers with old women and 
comic countrymen — and in the complexities of 
her plots mingles them together so bewilder- 
ingly that the wonder and interest of the audi- 
ence are kept vigorously alive until the curtain's 
fall. 

So in this sordid Windsor tragedy she intro- 
duces between the first and third acts a second, 

[96] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

where the tension is relaxed and the milder 
interest of Romance appears. 

It was not the purpose of the murderer to 
remain near the scene, or even in the country, 
of his crime: — he was a shrewd as well as 
merciless villain, and he turned his face towards 
Sydney, evidently with the intention of taking 
a steamer then about to sail for San Francisco, 
and sinking his identity in the vast areas and 
amid the swarming millions of the United 
States. 

Nemesis accompanied him, but in the disguise 
of Cupid. On the coastwise steamer by which 
he traveled to Sydney was a young woman by 
the name of Rounsfell, who was returning to 
her home in the interior of New South Wales 
from a visit to her brother near the border-line 
between Victoria and South Australia. She 
was about eighteen years of age, and from an 
interview I later had with her I estimated her 
as an attractive and modest girl, not strikingly 
intellectual, but of kindly disposition and af- 
fectionate nature. To her the fugitive, intro- 
ducing himself by his latest-assumed name, paid 
regardful court, and relieved the tedium of the 
voyage by devoted attentions; and when the 
boat arrived at Sydney, where she was to re- 

[97] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

main a few days, he escorted her to one hotel 
and saw to her satisfactory accommodation, 
while he himself, with admirable delicacy, took 
up quarters at another. During her stay he 
continued his attentions with equal respect and 
assiduity; his attitude, as she told me after- 
ward, was more like that of an elder brother 
than a lover — this attitude being confirmed by 
judicious advice and counsel, and even by moral 
admonition: — as when he gently chided her for 
her confessed fondness for dancing, sagely im- 
plying that he regarded this form of amuse- 
ment as one of the most insidious wiles of the 
Adversary. 

It was at Coogee, on the shores of the beau- 
tiful harbor of Sydney, that this chaste and im- 
proving courtship culminated in his asking her 
to marry him. He was a man of wealth, he 
told her, a mining engineer by profession, and 
with several lucrative positions in Australia at 
the moment waiting upon his selection. To 
these practical considerations he added the plea 
of his devotion. He had "lately lost his wife" 
(delicate euphemism!) he said, and stirred her 
sympathies by eloquent and tearful descrip- 
tions of the lonely and unsatisfactory life he 
led in consequence of this bereavement — the 
hollowness of which life he felt more acutely 

[98] 



-THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

than ever now that she had crossed his path. 
She was, as I have said, a tender-hearted girl, 
and what more natural than that she should 
willingly incline her ear to words which every 
woman loves to hear? — the more so when they 
were uttered by a man whose history indicates 
him to have inherited all the persuasiveness of 
the original Serpent in dealings with the sex, 
and who, as my interview with him in the con- 
demned cell caused me to remark, possessed one 
of the sweetest and most sympathetic voices I 
ever heard in human throat. 

It would be no discredit to Miss Rounsfell 
if she had accepted him then and there; but it 
speaks well for her prudence and self-command 
that she asked for delay in giving her answer 
until she could lay the matter before her 
parents. To this he promptly assented, adding 
the suggestion that he should accompany her 
to her home, and give her friends an oppor- 
tunity to become acquainted with him. This 
plan was carried out, and the successful con- 
quest of the daughter was completed by the 
capitulation of the family; the engagement was 
formally announced, and the joyful contract 
sealed by the installation upon the hand of the 
fiancee of the costly diamond ring so lately 
worn by the woman whose mutilated body was 

[99] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

at the moment mouldering under the hearth- 
stone at Windsor. 

The ecstasy of the betrothal inspired a con- 
sideration of ways and means to hasten the 
wedding. The ardent lover pleaded for the 
celebration of the nuptials without further ado ; 
but his more prudent mistress urged the pos- 
session of a home, and definite employment as 
surety of maintaining it. This point conceded, 
the question arose as to what particular sec- 
tion of the Colonies seemed to offer the most 
attractive opportunities. The bride-elect ob- 
jected to New South Wales as being too near 
home (she had always been a home-body, and 
wished to see the world) ; Victoria, also, was 
not to her taste for some other feminine but 
conclusive reason; Western Australia had just 
begun to come into notice as likely to become 
one of the world's greatest gold-producers — 
there, it seemed to her, was the land of 
promise for a young and experienced mining- 
engineer. 

This opinion prevailed, and the fugitive, 
abandoning any idea he may have had of 
escaping to America, set out for the new El 
Dorado; and in a few weeks his fiancee was 
cheered by a letter giving news of his arrival 
[ioo] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

at Southern Cross — a mining-camp some nun- 
dred and fifty miles in the interior — where he 
had secured the post of manager for a com- 
pany which owned a rich deposit, and where 
he was already preparing for her coming. Thus 
some weeks passed, until another letter came 
informing her that a house had been secured 
and fitted up for her, and enclosing sufficient 
funds for her journey. She replied, fixing the 
date of her departure from Sydney, and on 
the day appointed took train for Mel- 
bourne, intending to continue thence to Albany 
by sea. 

Arriving at Melbourne the following morn- 
ing — where by chance she took a room in the 
same "Coffee Palace" to which her prospective 
bridegroom had resorted upon his arrival from 
England — she despatched a note to a young 
man who was a long-time friend of her family, 
and when he called in the evening went out 
with him for a stroll through the city. As they 
passed the office of The Age newspaper on 
Collins street, they saw an excited crowd sur- 
rounding the bulletin-board, and crossed the 
roadway to read the announcement that it bore. 
As her eyes rested upon it, Miss Rounsfell gave 
a piercing shriek, and fell senseless upon the 
ground. 

[IOI] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

The announcement upon the board was 
this: 



"BARON SWANSTON, THE WINDSOR MURDERER, 
ARRESTED AT SOUTHERN CROSS." 



Taken to her hotel and revived with diffi- 
culty, she told her sensational story, with which 
the newspapers of the whole country were filled 
next day; then, broken and trembling, she re- 
turned to her home, there to remain until sum- 
moned again to Melbourne to give her testi- 
mony at the trial which took place a month 
later. 

Most strangely had it happened that by her 
unwitting influence the criminal career of 
Frederick Bailey Deeming had been brought to 
an end. Had she consented to live, after her 
anticipated marriage, in New South Wales or 
Victoria, he might never have been appre- 
hended. In these two colonies — except for the 
seeming impossibility of the murdered body 
being discovered — he might have come and 
gone without suspicion; his only peril being the 
almost negligible one that some associate of his 
voyage from England, or one of the very few 
persons in Melbourne who had seen him with 
his former wife, might encounter him and in- 
[102] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

quire as to his changed name and partner: — 
but the extrication of himself from such an en- 
tanglement would have been merely a stimu- 
lating mental exercise to Deeming, whose 
record, as searched after his latest crime was 
known and the hue-and-cry was on his trail, 
shows him to have been a most accomplished 
swindler, and a man of singular address in all 
forms of deceit. 

In these comparatively populous sections, too, 
the free and wide circulation of newspapers 
would have brought immediate warning, by an- 
nouncement of the discovery of the Windsor 
murder, of the danger he was in, and thus have 
aided his escape; for it was not until several 
days after the body was found that its identity 
was revealed, and many more before any clue 
was found to Deeming's whereabouts. With 
railways extending to ports in New South 
Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Queens- 
land, his opportunities for quitting the country 
quickly and secretly were numerous; and once 
away before the search for him had even been 
started, the chance of capturing him would have 
been poor indeed. 

In Western Australia, whither Miss Rouns- 
fell had been innocently instrumental in sending 
him, the situation was entirely different. No 
[103] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

railways connect the colony with the others, and 
ingress and egress are alike possible only by 
sea. Moreover, being the latest of the Colonies 
in which the old English system of penal-trans- 
portation was abolished, and still harboring 
many of the former subjects of that regime, 
Western Australia at this time maintained 
through its police a close system of espionage 
over all who arrived or departed by the few 
seaports of the district. Thus did the mur- 
derer walk into a cul-de-sac; and when the pur- 
suit (by an extraordinarily sagacious piece of 
deductive work on the part of the Melbourne 
detectives, which it would interfere with the 
purpose of this narrative to describe) reached 
Albany, the officers, armed with warrants for 
his arrest and learning from the local police 
records that a man such as they described had 
"gone up country" and had not returned, had 
only to endure the tedious desert journey to 
Frazer's gold-mines at Southern Cross, and 
apprehend him in the very house he had pre- 
pared for his awaited bride. 



[io 4 ] ^ 



CHAPTER IV 

The Expiation 

Run to earth, and captured like a rabbit at 
the end of its burrow, the murderer was 
brought to Albany, and shipped to Melbourne 
by the liner "Ballaarat." As a relief from the 
general lack of events of interest that marked 
his return progress, it may be noted that the 
train on which he traveled from Freemantle to 
Albany, was stormed at York by an indignant 
populace, who voiced the sentiment universally 
pervading all the Colonies against his atrocities 
by a determined effort to visit a rude, if origi- 
nal, form of justice upon him by tearing him to 
pieces between two bullock-teams, and were dis- 
suaded with difficulty from this intention by a 
display of revolvers by his guards. His feel- 
ings were outraged also on the steamer, where 
he expressed himself as much distressed by the 
light and profane conversation of certain unre- 
generate marines who were on their way to the 
Australian station, and strongly rebuked them 
therefor: — thus illustrating anew the strange 
contradiction in his nature which was before 

[io 5 ] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

shown in his reproach of Miss RounsfelFs fond- 
ness for dancing. In fact, all who at various 
times came in contact with him — including and 
ending with his guardians in the Melbourne 
jail — remarked upon his scrupulousness of lan- 
guage and nicety of conduct. 

I have gone thus at some length into a de- 
scription of this monster and his crimes for two 
reasons: — in the first place because it seemed 
essential to show the causes of the repulsion 
and horror which his very name inspired, and 
thus to place the reader in a position to ap- 
preciate the effect upon the popular mind of 
later incidents which I am about to record; 
and, in the second place, because the close study 
which I was able to give alike to the man and 
his deeds convinced me that his case was one 
possessing far more interest for the psychologist 
than even the criminologist 

The ingenious Sir William S. Gilbert, in the 
song of the sentimental police sergeant in "The 
Pirates of Penzance,'' wherein it is recited that 

"When the enterprizing burglar isn't burgling, 
When the cutthroat isn't occupied with crime, 
He loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling, 
And listens to the merry village chime" — 

[106] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

voiced a truth which has been marked in the 
cases of many malefactors. It has been ob- 
served of Deeming that, in the intervals of 
swindling, lying and homicide by which his 
career is chiefly remembered, he bristled like a 
copybook with virtuous and noble sentiments — 
nor is his sincerity to be doubted in their ut- 
terance. It is unquestionable that he was a man 
of singular address and subtlety — not only 
among men skilled in business affairs and ex- 
perienced in reading character. He was a 
clever mechanic, and able to adapt himself 
quickly and efficiently to any occupation : — as is 
shown by the fact that although there is nothing 
in his history to indicate that he had had any 
previous experience in mine-management, he 
more than fulfilled all the requirements laid 
upon him at Southern Cross, increased the out- 
put of gold by ingenious inventions, and was 
esteemed by the company as the most capable 
manager it had ever had. He had a marked, 
if imperfectly developed, fondness for music 
and literature, and although his conversation 
included many grammatical solecisms, it was 
effective and often eloquent. His taste in dress, 
although rather flamboyant in the matter of 
jewelry, of which he always wore a profusion, 
was noticeably correct — the frock-coat, light 
[107] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

trousers and perfectly-fitting patent-leather 
shoes which he wore at his trial were evidently 
from the hands of the best London outfitters, 
and would have graced (as they doubtless had 
done) the fashionable afternoon parade which 
is a feature of Melbourne's Collins Street. 

The anomaly that is suggested by these 
established facts regarding him is of minor in- 
terest, however, in comparison with more 
striking contradictions that were remarked 
after his capture. It was my fortune to have 
a place near him at the inquest which resulted 
in his commitment for trial, as well as at the 
trial itself that duly followed. Popular feeling 
against him was so intense and violent that the 
authorities did not dare to land him at the 
steamboat pier, but smuggled him aboard a tug 
when the "Ballaarat" entered the harbor, and 
brought him ashore at the suburb of St. Kilda, 
whence he was hurried in a closed cab to the 
Melbourne jail. Brought into the court where 
the inquest was held, his appearance was so 
brutal and revolting that a murmur of horror 
and disgust arose at his entrance which the 
judge and officers with difficulty quelled. 

There was in his deeply-lined and saturnine 
face no indication of an understanding of his 
position. His lips were drawn in a sardonic 
[108] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

sneer, and his eyes — steely, evil and magnetic — 
glistened like those of the basilisk as he looked 
boldly and with a sort of savage bravado at 
the faces about him. He disdained to pay any 
attention to the proceedings, and was seemingly 
deaf to the testimony that was advanced against 
him by more than thirty witnesses. Yet he 
evinced a lively, if contemptuous, interest in 
minor details, and audibly expressed his views 
regarding them. When the canary that had 
played so singular a part in his Australian ex- 
periences was produced, still in its ornate gilded 
cage, he cried out: "Hullo! here comes the 
menagerie! Why don't the band play?" Of 
a reporter taking notes at a table near him he 
remarked that "he wrote like a hen," com- 
mented upon the weak utterance of a certain 
witness that "he had no more voice than a con- 
sumptive shrimp," and interjected ribald criti- 
cisms on the words of the judge that were fairly 
shocking under the circumstances. 

When, at the termination of the proceedings, 
the judge ordered his commitment for trial, 
and stated that a rescript would be issued 
against him for the wilful murder of his wife, 
Emily Williams, he shouted, in a shrill, cack- 
ling, strident sort of voice: "And when you 
have got it, you can put it in your pipe and 
[109] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

smoke it!"— looking about with a demoniac 
grin as if expecting applause for an effective bit 
of repartee. As the constables seized him and 
dragged him to the door, his eyes fell upon a 
comely young woman standing on the edge of 
the crowd, who regarded him with horrified 
amazement. Breaking away from the officers, 
he danced up to her, chucked her under the 
chin, and with his leering face close to hers 
ejaculated: "O, you ducky, ducky!" and 
disappeared amid the cries of the scandalized 
lookers-on. 

I do not know what the emotions of other 
attendants on the trial may have been, but I 
remember my own mental attitude as one of 
distaste that my duties as a correspondent re- 
quired my presence. To see one weak human 
being contending for his life against the or- 
ganized and tremendous forces of the Law is 
always a pitiful and moving spectacle; in this 
case, with recollections of the repulsive inci- 
dents of the inquest in mind, one nerved one- 
self for some scene of desperation and horror. 
The dock, surrounded by a spiked railing and 
already guarded by a posse of white-helmeted 
constables, stood in the centre of the court- 
room, its platform, elevated some three feet 
[no] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

from the floor, being furnished with a trap- 
door that communicated with the cells below by 
a spiral iron staircase, which the prisoner must 
ascend. The audience watched this trap-door 
in somewhat that state of hesitating eagerness 
with which a child awaits the spring of a jack- 
in-the-box, not knowing what grotesque or ter- 
rifying thing may appear : — and when it lifted, 
and the murderer stepped to his place beneath 
the thousand-eyed gaze that was fastened upon 
him, a murmur in which amazement was the 
dominant note ran through the room. 

My own first feeling was that my eyesight 
was playing me a trick; my second, that by some 
change of program of which I had not been 
informed, the trial of Deeming had been post- 
poned. In this frock-coated, well-groomed and 
gentlemanly person in the dock there was no 
trace whatever of the ruffian who had been the 
central figure of the inquest. In age he seemed 
to have dropped some twenty years; his man- 
ner was perfect, showing no trace either of 
apprehension or bravado: — in short, the im- 
pression he conveyed (as I described it in my 
correspondence at the time) was of a young 
clergyman of advanced views presenting him- 
self to trial for heresy, rather than of one of 
the most brutal murderers of his generation. 

Cm] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

This impression prevailed during the four days 
his trial lasted; only once or twice could one 
detect in his eye the former flash of implacable- 
ness and ferocity. It was not as if he made 
an effort to keep himself in control, but rather 
as if he were a man with two strongly opposed 
and antagonistic sides to his nature, of which 
one or the other might manifest itself without 
any conscious exercise of will. 

It was also evident to anyone who could ob- 
serve him dispassionately that the details of 
the murder, as they were brought out in the 
testimony, were all as news to him : — and when, 
in the address he made to the jury before it 
retired to consider its verdict, he admitted 
knowledge of the subsidiary facts brought out 
(as to his acquaintance with Miss Rounsfell, for 
example), but swore he was as innocent as he 
was incapable of the murder of his wife, I, for 
one, believed him sincere, although I could per- 
ceive in the faces about me that I was alone 
in that opinion. A suggestion that this man 
might illustrate the phenomenon of "dual per- 
sonality" and should be subjected to hypnotic 
suggestion at the hands of qualified experts, 
rather than have swift condemnation measured 
out to him, would doubtless have been received 
with derision by the hard-headed audience that 

[112] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

was the real jury Th the case ; but I felt at the 
time, and feel now even more strongly, that if 
Frederick Bailey Deeming had been tried in a 
country where psychological aberrations have 
been the subject of study, he would have been 
committed, not to the hangman, but to a life- 
long restraint wherein science might have 
gained from his extraordinary personality 
much valuable knowledge. 

The man whose life was choked out of him 
on the gallows three weeks later was the man 
of the inquest, not the man of the trial — and 
in this fact is some occasion for satisfaction. 
He was more subdued, as though he appreci- 
ated — as any other animal might do — what the 
sinister preparations for his ending meant: — 
but when, as he hung beneath the open trap, the 
death-cap was lifted from his face, there were 
plainly to be seen the hard and brutal lines 
about his mouth, and the wolfish sneer upon 
his lips, which one could not but feel, with some- 
thing like a shudder, had distinguished his 
features in the commission of the atrocities for 
which at last he had paid such insufficient price 
as society could exact. 

The scaffold of the Melbourne jail is a per- 
manent structure with several traps; and across 

[113] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

and above it runs a heavy beam, its ends fixed 
in the solid masonry of the walls, and the 
greater part of its length scarred and grooved 
by the chafing of the ropes which, from time 
to time, have given despatch to the souls of 
several hundred murderers. As I looked up 
at this fearsome tally-stick, I turned to the 
oldest warder of the jail, a man of nearly 
seventy years, who had been present at my 
interview with Deeming a few days before, and 
who now stood beside me. 

"I want to ask you a question," I said, "un- 
less your official position may prevent your 
answering it." 

"What is it, sir?" he inquired. 

"You have been for many years a warder 
here, and must have seen many men under sen- 
tence of death." 

"Yes," he replied. "I was first here in the 
bushranging days, and have been here ever 
since. I fancy I have seen two hundred men 
depart this life by the route of that gal- 
lows." 

"Then," said I, "you should be a good judge 
of the character and mental state of a man who 
is awaiting a death of that sort. Here is my 
question: — What is your opinion of Deem- 
ing?" 

[114] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

"Mad, sir," replied the warder. "Mad as a 
March hare." 

This verdict might be qualified, but I believe 
it to be essentially just. 



[115] 



CHAPTER V 

THE HOUSE ON THE HILL 

In beginning this chapter I find myself fac- 
ing a dilemma — one not so puzzling as that 
which gave Hamlet pause, and evoked his 
famous soliloquy, and yet like it, too, in that 
it forces me to hesitate before the mystery of 
the Unseen. Thus far my story has the support 
of incontrovertible facts and permanent and 
referable legal and criminal records; I must 
now cut loose from these, and trust my weight 
upon the assertion that the last half of my nar- 
rative, which I now launch upon, is in every 
detail and particular as true as the first. In 
the stress of the responsibility thus assumed it 
might seem natural to marshall about me such 
facts and persons as I might invoke as cor- 
roborative witnesses. Of these there are not 
a few: — but although there is (sometimes) 
"wisdom in a multitude of counsellors," con- 
viction in the actuality of truth in narrations 
of so-called "supernatural" phenomena is as 
likely as otherwise to be befogged in exact pro- 
portion to the size of their "cloud of wit- 
[116] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

nesses." Therefore I have, after reflection, 
decided to "take the stand" myself and unsup- 
ported, and to throw myself upon the mercy 
of the court — my readers — in so doing. 

Thus, then, I shall not reveal the exact loca- 
tion of The House on the Hill, nor the name 
of the owner, from whom, for a year, I rented 
it. It is doubtful that he be now living, for he 
was a man of advanced age when he left his 
house in my hands, and departed with his two 
unmarried daughters (themselves of mature 
years) for a twelve-months' tour in Europe. 
On his return I handed him the keys without 
any reference to the strange occurrences that 
had come to me from my bargaining with him : 
— nor do I know to this day whether he had 
similar experiences after my departure, or even 
whether they may have enlivened him and his 
family prior to my tenancy. His evident anxiety 
to lease the house for a time (I took it fur- 
nished, and at a rental absurdly low — in fact, 
just one-half his original demand) may have 
had no special significance, although I often 
fancied afterwards that I had found a reason 
for it: — but on consideration I decided not to 
refer to certain features of the house that he 
had failed to enumerate as among its attrac- 

["7i 



-> 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

tions, and to restore him without remark to 
their renewal — if he knew of them — or to dis- 
cover them for himself — if he did not. 

It is probable that few of my readers have 
spent a year in a "haunted house" — I use this 
expression, although it defines nothing, for want 
of a better: — but those who cherish such an 
experience will understand why, on the one 
hand, I did not wish to alarm an elderly gentle- 
man and his amiable daughters, or "give a bad 
name," as the saying is, to his property; and 
why, on the other, I did not care to run the 
risk of living in his recollection, and in the 
minds of his neighbors to whom he might re- 
late my story, as a person of feeble intellect, 
if not a lunatic outright. But I would give a 
good deal to know what he knew about that 
house. 

A circumstance that I took no note of at the 
time, but which afterwards seemed to have a 
possible significance, occurred at the house one 
evening when I had called to complete negotia- 
tions by signing the lease and going through 
other formalities precedent to taking posses- 
sion. The owner had told me that one of his 
reasons for desiring a change of scene for a 
time was that his wife had died three months 
before after a lingering illness that had com- 
[118] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

pletely worn out his daughters as well as him- 
self: — and when the business of his final even- 
ing was completed, the younger woman uttered 
this strange remark: — "Well, it will be a relief 
not to see mother about all the time!" — and 
was immediately checked by her sister. I had 
before noted her as a nervous-mannered, some- 
what anaemic-looking person, and her observa- 
tion touched my mind too lightly to leave any 
impression upon it. 

There was nothing at all peculiar in the ap- 
pearance of the house. It stood upon a breezy 
hill-top in the outskirts of one of Melbourne's 
most attractive suburbs; the train from town 
landed me, every evening, at the village sta- 
tion, and a ten-minute walk up a rather steep 
road brought me comfortably to home and 
dinner. The house was a delightful one when 
you got to it. It occupied a corner lot, and had 
extensive grounds around it; there was a large 
orchard at the rear, filled with grape-vines, and 
pear, lemon, and Rg trees — although none of 
them did much in the matter of bearing. There 
were two trees in the front yard that gave pro- 
fusely of pomegranates (a decorative fruit, but 
one whose edible qualities always seemed to me 
greatly overrated) ; there were spacious flower 

[119] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

beds on both sides of the building, and the 
nearest neighbors were at least two hundred 
yards away. On the other side of the street 
which ran in front of the house was a large, 
unimproved lot which gave a touch of the coun- 
try by the presence in it of several ancient gum 
trees, in which the "laughing jackasses" cackled 
and vociferated both morning and evening: — 
and when my wife and I, and the gentleman of 
Scottish ancestry and of advanced middle-age, 
whom, as our best of friends, we had induced 
to share the enterprise with us, looked about 
upon these things on the first afternoon of our 
occupancy, we pronounced them all "very 
good." 

The house was not a large one, comprising 
six living-rooms and a kitchen, besides a bath 
and a commodious storeroom and pantry. It 
was of the bungalow pattern, a type which is 
a favorite one in Australia, where the high 
average temperature of the year makes cool- 
ness and airiness prime essentials in a dwelling. 
It had no cellar, but was raised above the 
ground upon brickwork, thus forming a dry 
air-chamber below, and above its single story 
was a low, unfinished attic, which afforded an- 
other air-space, and stretched without parti- 
tions from front to back of the house. There 
[120] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

was no floor to this attic, and on the only occa- 
sion when I explored it, I had to crawl from 
beam to beam, the pointed roof being so low 
that I could barely stand upright even under 
its ridgepole. The only means of access to 
this part of the house was a ladder, which 
could be brought into the bathroom, and from 
which could be raised a light trap-door in the 
ceiling. A veranda ran along the front of the 
house, and a wide hall extended, without turn 
or obstruction, from front to back. On one 
side of this hall — beginning from the veranda 
— were the parlor, dining-room, bedroom, and 
pantry; on the other, my wife's bedroom, the 
bathroom, our friend's room, a "spare-room," 
and the kitchen : — while a few yards behind the 
house stood a one-story structure, fitted up as a 
laundry. The "spare-room" here mentioned I 
furnished as a smoking-room; and further 
equipped it by building a bench across the space 
before the single window, whereat I employed 
myself now and then in preparing the skins of 
birds of which I was making a collection, and 
which I either shot myself in frequent excur- 
sions into the country, or which were sent to 
me by agents, both whites and "blackfellows," 
whom I employed in various parts of the 
Colonies. 

[121] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

One, and perhaps the most peculiar, feature 
of the bungalow remains to be described. This 
was a small apartment, about five feet square, 
between the bathroom and our friend's room 
(but without any means of direct communica- 
tion with either), and entered only by a nar- 
row door which swung outward into the hall. 
It was unlighted, and was provided with air 
by a ventilator at the end of a shaft which was 
carried through the ceiling into the attic and 
ended in the roof. Its floor was of thickly-laid 
concrete, and in its centre, and occupying nearly 
the whole ground space, was a sunken portion 
about two feet deep, and equipped with wooden 
racks upon which boxes of butter, pans of milk, 
and various receptacles containing similar 
perishable articles of food were accommodated. 
This chamber was of real use in a country where 
— at the time at least — ice was scarce and ex- 
pensive, and where summer temperatures of 
a hundred and ten degrees in the shade might 
be expected; since, being placed in a part of 
the house which was wholly removed from the 
direct rays of the sun, the air in it was always 
cool and dry. I am particular in describing 
this room because of a strange incident that 
later occurred in it. 

The house was well, almost luxuriously, fur- 
[122] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

nished. The parlor contained a fine piano, and 
several pictures of merit adorned the walls; 
heat (seldom necessary in that mild climate ex- 
cept on rainy days in autumn and winter) was 
furnished to this and other rooms by open fire- 
places, and vases and other bric-a-brac stood 
upon the mantels; the bed and table linen was 
all of excellent quality, there was a sufficiency 
of crockery and glass and silverware and 
culinary utensils : — and as we sat down to our 
inauguratory dinner, and contrasted our con- 
dition with the three years' previous experience 
of travel and steamer and hotel life in all parts 
of Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania and the 
Fiji Islands, we congratulated each other that 
we had found a "home" indeed. 

We set about forthwith to improve our tem- 
porary property. On one side of the house, 
and separated from it by a fence that inclosed 
the lawn and flower gardens, was a grassy 
"paddock" that might formerly have pastured 
a horse or a cow. As we had no use for either 
of these animals, we turned this space into a 
poultry yard, and populated it with chickens, 
ducks and geese — which thrived amazingly, and 
in due time furnished us all the eggs and 
poultry required for our table. Our friend (by 
nature and early training an ardent horticul- 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

turist, but whose energies in that science had for 
many years enjoyed no opportunity for exer- 
cise in the soil of the Melbourne Stock Ex- 
change, of which he was a member) joyously 
took the flower gardens under his control, and 
achieved miracles therein. It was delightful, 
as I sat in the shady veranda on the hot Satur- 
day afternoons, with a steamer chair to loll in, 
and a pipe and cooling drink at hand, to con- 
template his enthusiasm as he delved and 
sweated to prepare new ground for the gor- 
geous blooms which he coaxed from the willing 
soil — at the same time extolling my own sagacity 
in asking him to share the place with us; to 
which he would respond in appropriate lan- 
guage. Our household was so small that we 
were not exposed to the annoyances of the 
"servant-girl" problem: — our friend and I 
lunched in town, and a capable woman who 
lived nearby assisted my wife in cooking and 
serving our dinners, and attended to the duties 
of house-cleaning — returning to her own home 
when her work was accomplished, and leaving 
us to ourselves in the evenings. We were near 
enough to town to run in for theatres and con- 
certs whenever we were so minded, and on Sun- 
days did some modest entertaining: — in short, 
we settled into a phase of existence as nearly 

[ia 4 ] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

Arcadian as is often possible under modern 
conditions of civilization, and although it 
seemed likely to be commonplace and unevent- 
ful, we were in mood to find it all the more 
desirable and pleasant on that account. That 
the most startling experiences of our lives were 
soon to come upon us never entered our heads, 
and for some six weeks we lived in serenity and 
happiness amid surroundings that day by day 
grew more attractive. 



[125] 



CHAPTER VI 

ON THE WINGS OF THE STORM 

My interview with the murderer, as de- 
scribed in the first chapter, took place upon a 
Thursday. The next day was one of the gen- 
eral holidays that are so profusely celebrated 
in Australia : — I do not remember the occasion, 
but it is safe to assume that some important 
horse race was to be run at Flemington — the 
Epsom of the Antipodes. At all events, I took 
advantage of the opportunity to go into the 
country with my gun on a collecting trip, 
and returned at night with a fine as- 
sortment of cockatoos, parrots and other 
brilliantly plumaged or curious birds which 
make the Colonies a paradise for the orni- 
thologist. 

The day following — Saturday — opened with 
a heavy rain, and a strong wind off the sea. I 
had no particular business to call me to town, 
and, anyhow, all activities and occupations 
would cease at noon in deference to the usual 
weekly half-holidav. Moreover, I had several 

[126] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

hours' work before me in removing and pre- 
serving the skins of the birds I had shot; so 
I suppressed the faint voice of duty that sug- 
gested that I might find something of im- 
portance awaiting me in Melbourne, and after 
breakfast sat down to the congenial labor of 
my taxidermist's bench. Our friend departed 
for the Stock Exchange, and my wife and I 
were left alone in the house. 

I had no more than made the preliminary 
incision in the breast of a purple lorrikeet when 
the doorbell rang. Answering the summons I 
found in the veranda a black-haired, sallow- 
faced individual, his garments sodden with rain, 
who offered for my purchase and perusal "The 
History and Last Confession of Frederick 
Bailey Deeming," for "the small price of six- 
pence." More in commiseration for the 
wretched and bedraggled appearance of the 
vendor than from any other motive (for I was 
already acquainted with the "History," and 
gave no credence to any announcement that a 
"Confession" had been made) I bought the 
pamphlet and returned to my room. Finding, 
as I had suspected, that this piece of literature 
contained no new facts whatever, and was 
totally lacking in anything even the most re- 
motely suggesting confession, I threw it into the 
[127] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

fire that blazed on the hearth and took up my 
interrupted work.* 

The incident of the water-soaked vendor and 
his pamphlet had had the effect, however, of 
turning my reflections into a very unpleasant 
channel. In spite of all efforts to apply myself 
to the task in hand, the thought of the despair- 
ing man in the condemned cell, my visit to him 
two days before, and my anticipated presence 
at his execution within forty-eight hours, pressed 
upon my spirit with a weight which I found it 
impossible to lift. An incident which had oc- 
curred on the previous day had also added a 
certain element of pathos to the situation. 

*I had good personal reasons for discrediting any 
rumor that Deeming had made confession, for the reason 
that, with the sanction of the authorities in his case, 
and assisted by his own counsel, I had made every effort 
to secure it myself — and had failed. When the matter 
was suggested to Deeming, and he was assured that the 
money that was offered to him for his memoirs would 
be paid to Miss Rounsfell as some slight recognition of 
the wrong he had done her, he eagerly assented; and 
being supplied with pens (quill — for not the least article 
in steel was allowed him) he went to work, and in a 
few days had turned out a large amount of manu- 
script. Examination of it, however, was disappointing. 
It began encouragingly, and there were lucid passages 
in it; but as a whole it was utterly incoherent — and to 
those who had dispassionately studied the man, an un- 
doubted proof of his insanity. 

[128] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

During my absence a letter had come to my 
wife through the morning mail, which, to her 
astonishment and disquiet, proved to have been 
written by the murderer. It ran as follows : 

"H. M. Gaol 
"Melbourne 
"18-5-92 
"Dear Madam: 

"I beg to tender you my sincere thanks 
for your extreme kindness on my behalf, 
in trying to get Miss Rounsefell to come 
and see me. I assure you that if she had 
come I could have died happy, as it is I 
shall die most unhappy. I am very sorry 
indeed that you did not find her as kind 
and as Christian like as yourself. Again 
thanking you, 

"I beg to remain 

"Most respectfully yours 

"B. Swanston. 

• "you may show Miss Rounsefell this if 
you wish. B. S." 

This remarkable document, from a man at 
the moment standing on the brink of eternity, 
greatly disturbed (as I have said) its re- 
[129] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

cipient; but she did not hesitate. As the letter 
intimates, she had already, in pursuance of a 
promise she was almost compelled to make 
through the earnest plea of the murderer when 
she saw him in the condemned cell, seen Miss 
Rounsfell (this is the correct spelling of the 
name, not that used by the writer of the above 
letter) with the lack of success that the letter 
suggests. Now, however, she determined to 
see the girl again: — and showing her the letter, 
she urged her to see the man — or at the least 
write to him — and grant her pardon to a dying 
creature who seemed to have no hope of pardon 
elsewhere, either here or hereafter. The inter- 
view was a touching one : — Miss Rounsfell was 
deeply affected, and (greatly to her credit, I 
think) consented to undertake in person the 
charitable mission that she had been asked to 
perform. But her brother so strenuously op- 
posed the idea — even to the minor extent of 
writing — that she was compelled to abandon 
it; and Deeming went to his death without the 
consolation that he had so simply and eloquently 
craved. 

Thus in many ways I had been brought into 

this tragical affair much more intimately than 

I liked, and I could not keep my mind away 

from it. The day itself added to the gloom 

[130] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

that fell upon me. The storm had steadily 
increased in violence since early morning; rain 
fell in torrents, and the wind roared and 
whined alternately about the house; the heavy 
clouds that passed close overhead cast upon the 
earth a series of shifting shadows as their sub- 
stance thickened or thinned under the rending 
force of the gale — if the Powers of Darkness 
ever walk abroad by day, they could hardly 
find an occasion more eerie and fitting than 
this. Yet no such suggestion occurred to me: 
— I could hear the rattle of dishes in the kitchen 
and the voice of my wife in song as she attended 
to her household duties; I lighted my pipe as 
another means of affording the companion- 
ship that I somehow craved, and for an hour 
or so applied myself assiduously to the task in 
hand. 

I was seated facing the window, my back 
to the open door that led into the hall. Sud- 
denly, and without the slightest warning, I 
heard behind me a long and dismal groan. 
"A-a-ah!" — thus it came; a woman's voice, 
apparently, and with an indescribable but cer- 
tain accent in it of mental or physical pain. 
It is no exaggeration to say that this awful and 
ghastly sound froze me where I sat; I could 
feel my hair move upon my scalp, and a chill, 

[131] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

as though I had been dashed with ice-water, 
ran up and down my spine. For a moment an 
inexpressible horror possessed me — then I felt 
my blood, which seemed on the instant to have 
stopped in its course, flow again in my veins, 
and with a mighty effort I arose and faced the 
open door. There was nothing there — nor in 
the dim hall, into which I shortly ventured: — 
I removed my slippers and silently explored 
every room; still nothing to be seen, and the 
only sound the splash of rain, and of the wind 
that sobbed and muttered around the house. I 
crept to the kitchen and peeped in cautiously: 
— my wife was quietly engaged in her work, 
and I was glad to think that she had heard 
nothing. Indeed, her undisturbed demeanor en- 
couraged the opinion I had begun to form,' 
that some peculiar effect of the wind in the 
open fireplace or the chimney of my room was 
responsible for the sound I had heard. 

Yet I was by no means satisfied with this 
explanation: — the cry was too human, the dis- 
tress it evidenced too poignant, to be thus 
counterfeited, and as I returned to my bench, 
it was with full expectation that I should hear 
it again. I was not disappointed. In a few 
moments it came, more distinct and lugubrious 
than before, and seemingly within the very room 
[132] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

itself; and as I whirled about to confront I 
knew not what, the groan was repeated, coming 
from the empty air before me and dying away 
in an unutterably sad and plaintive sigh. 

I made another swift and noiseless survey of 
the house, but it was as resultless as before, 
and regained my room much shaken, I will con- 
fess, but still unwilling to admit that the sounds 
could not be referred to natural causes. But I 
found no solution that convinced me. I might 
have attributed their first occurrence to hal- 
lucination, but the second hearing weakened 
that hypothesis — the groan and the following 
sigh were inimitably those of an old woman, 
who was either at the point of death or over- 
whelmed with distress of mind and body. This 
resemblance was absolute, and I sat for some 
time revolving the strange thing in my mind. 
I thought of relating my experience to my wife, 
but feared to alarm her, and finally went back 
to my birds. / 

Almost immediately there came for the third 
time that ghastly wail and sigh — so close to 
my ear that, had any living person uttered 
them, his face must almost have touched my 
own. I am not ashamed to say that the effect 
upon me was so unmanning and terrible that I 
uttered a cry of horror and fell backward with 
[133] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

the chair I sat in, and lay sprawling on the floor. 
At the same instant I heard my wife scream 
from the kitchen; and as I gathered myself 
up and ran to her, I saw her standing with 
her back against the wall, staring with horrified 
eyes, and with a look of repulsion and fear upon 
her face, at something invisible to me, on the 
other side of the room. I rushed to her and 
grasped her hands : — they were cold as ice, and 
her fixed and rigid gaze into what to me was 
emptiness, frightened me beyond measure. 

"In heaven's name," I cried, "what is it?" 

"It is Deeming's mother," she answered, in 
a whisper I could hardly hear. 

"Deeming's mother!" — I echoed her words: 
— "How do you know it is Deeming's mother?" 

"I saw her with him in his cell at the jail," 
she replied. 

"Then what he said was true, that his mother 
comes back to trouble him?" 

"Yes, it was true; and now she comes to 
me! Go away!" she cried, addressing some- 
thing / could not see. "I cannot help you ; why 
do you torment me! Ah!" — with a sigh of 
relief — "she has gone !" and she sank exhausted 
into a chair. 

We had a long and memorable talk after 
that, which I will briefly summarize. My wife 

[134] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

had not heard the groans that had been audible 
to me until their second repetition; then the 
sound that had seemed beside my ear came at 
the same instant close to hers, and her cry that 
joined with mine had been wrung from her by 
the sight of the apparition which on the instant 
presented itself to her. This was not the first 
time, however, that it had appeared: — it had 
closely followed upon the receipt of Deeming' s 
letter the day before, and its cries of distress 
and appeals for help had been so agonizing that 
it was as much on that account as because of the 
plea of the murderer himself that she had de- 
cided to see Miss Rounsfell again. 

The apparition did not reappear that day, 
and there was no recurrence of the wailing 
lamentations — but we were soon to have further 
experience of them for all that. 

The storm spent itself during the late after- 
noon, and was succeeded by a beautiful even- 
ing. The wind was still high, and the sky filled 
with broken masses of clouds, through which 
the full moon waded heavily: — and as my wife 
and I descended the hill, soon after dinner, to 
the railway station on our way to keep an en- 
gagement to call upon the Consul-General of 
the United States at his residence at St. Kilda, 
we agreed that the night was just such a one 
[135] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

as might inspire Dore in some one of his fan- 
tastic compositions. After the day's gruesome 
events we had hesitated about leaving our friend 
alone during our absence ; but we finally united 
upon the opinion which my wife advanced, that 
as she seemed to be the sole object of the ap- 
parition's visit, he was not likely to be molested. 
So we left him (albeit with some misgiving) 
comfortably seated before the dining-room fire 
in a large easy-chair, and with his pipe and a 
new novel for company, and took our de- 
parture. 

It was after midnight when we returned. 
The gale had blown itself out, and the moon 
looked down upon a world that seemed resting 
in sleep after the turmoil of the day. My wife 
went at once to her room to lay aside her outer 
garments and I repaired, with much curiosity 
and a little apprehension stirring me, to the 
dining-room. 

I found our friend as we had left him, book 
in hand and with his smoked-out pipe lying on 
a table beside him. He was not alone, how- 
ever — our two dogs — a wire-haired Scotch 
terrier and a fox-terrier — which I had as usual 
chained up for the night in their kennels at the 
back of the house, were dozing together on the 
hearth-rug. 

[136] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

"Hullo !" I exclaimed; "what are those dogs 
doing here? You know they are never allowed 
to come into the house." 

"Well," our friend replied. "I felt lonely, 
and so I brought them in to keep me company." 

"That's an odd idea," I rejoined. "I thought 
your book and pipe would be society enough. 
Besides, there is plenty of 'Scotch' and soda on 
the sideboard." 

"I tried that, too," he confessed. "But, do 
you know? this has been the most infernally 
unpleasant evening I ever spent in my life. The 
wind has been making the most uncanny noises 
— I would swear there were people moving all 
over the house if I did not know I was the only 
person in it. I have been all over the place 
a dozen times, but could find nothing. At last 
I couldn't stand it; so I unchained and brought 
in the dogs. Somehow they didn't seem to have 
much use for the place — I had to drag them in 
by their collars." 

"They knew they had no right to be here," 
I commented. "The matter with you is, you've 
been smoking too much, and got your nerves 
on edge. Come and help me put up the dogs 
before my wife sees them, or you'll 'get what 
for,' as your English expression is." 

This office performed, we returned to the 
[137] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

dining-room, where I suggested a "Scotch-and- 
soda" before retiring for the night, and to- 
gether at the sideboard we prepared each a 
modest potion. As we touched glasses to a 
good sleep and happy awakening, there sounded 
from the air behind us that weird and terrible 
cry! My friend's face turned ashen on the 
instant and his glass fell from his hand and 
lay shattered on the hardwood floor. 

"My God!" he cried; "did you hear that?" 

I was startled, of course, but the morning's 
experience, reinforced by anticipation of some 
such happening, had steeled my nerves. 

"Did I hear whatf I asked. "Look here, 
old man, you are certainly in a queer way to- 
night. What should I hear? — everything is 
as quiet as death." 

"Do you mean to tell me," he demanded, 
looking at me incredulously and with alarm 
still in his face, "that you did not hear that 
awful groan?" — but meanwhile I had filled an- 
other tumbler for him, which he hastily 
emptied, although the glass rattled against his 
teeth as he drank. 

"Come, come!" I said; "go to bed, and you 
will be all right in the morning;" — but the 
words had but left my lips when, right between 
us as it seemed, there swelled again upon the 

[138] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

air that utterance of anguish, followed by the 
dying cadence of a sigh. 

"There! — there! — there!" stammered my 
companion: — "did you hear it then?" 

"Yes, I did," I replied; "and the first time 
as well. Is that what has disturbed you to- 
night?" 

"No, not exactly that — nothing so awful; 
but all sorts of strange noises; I can't describe 
them. I say — what kind of a house is this ? I 
have always believed the stories of haunted 
houses were bally nonsense; but in heaven's 
name what does all this mean?" 

I was unable to enlighten him: — and al- 
though I called my wife from her room and 
described to him our morning's experience with 
the voices, I thought it best to keep the feature 
of the apparition a secret. In fact, he never 
did learn of it, or of many other things that 
did not come directly to his personal appre- 
hension. What he did see and hear, in the 
months that followed, was bad enough, God 
knows ! — and I am convinced that one of the 
reasons (and that not the least considerable) 
which prevented him from leaving us on any 
one of a dozen different occasions, and our- 
selves from abandoning the house outright, was 
the consideration (on his part) that it would 
[139] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

be unseemly for one of his nation to confess 
himself inferior in rh; :k :: ;n American, and 
fon ours) that we should be untrue to all our 
country's traditions if we permitted a Britisher 
to see us in retreat. 

This reason may seem extreme, and even 
fantastical: but it has its weight in explaining 
why — at the outset, at least — we held our 
ground. In the long discussion which followed. 
that night, it was evident that each party was 
urgent that the other should suggest abandon- 
ment of the premises. Neither, however, would 
broach the subject, and we separated for bed 
at last with the implied understanding that we 
were to remain. 



[140] 



CHAPTER VII 

A GHOSTLY CO-TENANCY 

Such was the first manifestation of a Pos- 
session which held the house for more than nine 
months. That we endured it is to me now 
sufficient cause for wonder, and the reasons why 
we did so (reasons which presented them- 
selves by degrees) may require some explana- 
tion. It must be said that with the exception 
of a few visitations which I shall duly describe, 
there were no occasions so terrifying as those 
which happened on the day of the storm. 
Moreover, as my wife and I had made ac- 
quaintance in former years with many inex- 
plicable things and had never seen any serious 
results come from them, our attitude toward 
these new phenomena was one compact more 
of curiosity than anything else. The experi- 
ence could hardly be called agreeable, but it 
was strange and unusual, and we wanted to find 
out what it all meant. We never did find out, 
by the way, but the anticipation (which was con- 
stant) that we should, kept us interested. 

The amiable reader may be disposed to 
credit us with unusual courage, but we never 

[ho 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

looked at the matter in that light. Besides the 
influence of national pride which I have men- 
tioned as supporting both our friend and our- 
selves, there was also the consideration that we 
had covenanted for the house for a year, and 
had paid the first six-months' rent in advance 
— and Yankee and Scottish thrift alike moved 
us to desire our money's worth; and although 
we might hope to annul our bargain if we could 
plead that the dwelling was infested with rats, 
we had doubts as to our standing in court in 
case we should set up a defense that it was 
overrun with ghosts. Moreover, we liked our 
quarters so well that we could not make up our 
minds to leave them merely because an unseen 
co-tenantry insisted on sharing them with us; 
therefore we remained, and in time even man- 
aged to extract some entertainment from the 
quips and cranks that were more or less con- 
stantly going on. 

A saving feature of the situation was the 
fact that the manifestations were not continu- 
ous, and rarely occurred — until near the end of 
our term — at night. This, I think, must be 
set down as an unusual circumstance, but it was 
one that brought us considerable relief. It need 
not be pointed out, for example, how much less 
terrifying it is to hear muffled footsteps and the 

[142] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

rustle of women's garments up and down the 
hall by daylight than in darkness, and to see, 
under the same conditions, chairs and light 
tables shifted about in apparent accordance 
with some invisible person's notion of their 
proper arrangement. It is somewhat disquiet- 
ing, to be sure, when walking through the hall, 
to hear the bell above one's head break out in 
rattling clangor, and, looking through the wide- 
open front door, to perceive that no visible visit- 
or was at the other end of the wire: — and in 
spite of many former experiences, we could not 
restrain ourselves from jumping in our seats 
when, at dinner, all the doors in the house 
would slam in rapid succession with a violence 
that set the dishes dancing on the board. And 
the singular thing about this performance was 
that although the sound was unmistakably that 
of banging doors, the doors themselves seemed 
to have no part in it. More than once we ar- 
ranged them in anticipation of this manifesta- 
tion, leaving some closed, some wide open, and 
some ajar at various angles which we carefully 
noted. Presently would come the expected 
thunderous reverberations — and running from 
the dining-room we would find every door pre- 
cisely as we had left it. 

Occasionally, what seemed like a rushing 

[143] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

wind would sweep through the hall between the 
wire-screened doors at either end of the house, 
although a glance out of the window showed 
that the leaves of the trees in the yard were 
pendent and lifeless in an utter calm : — and this 
circumstance reminds me of a curious thing that 
was several times repeated. 

We rarely used the parlor, which, as I have 
said, was on the right of the hall as one entered 
the house, with windows giving upon the 
veranda. To the decorations of this room which 
had been left by our landlord, we had made some 
considerable additions — photographs of New 
Zealand scenery, curios and wall hangings from 
Fiji, and other such matters. Now and then 
would break out in that room a racket as though 
a dozen devils were dancing the tarantelle, ac- 
companied by a sound as of a maelstrom of 
wind whirling in it. We never had courage to 
enter while the disturbance was in progress — 
in fact we had no time to do so, as it always 
ended within a few minutes ; but when we opened 
the door after the noise had subsided, we in- 
variably found the same condition of affairs — 
every article in the room that belonged to us 
piled in a heap on the floor, and all the pos- 
sessions of the absent family standing or hang- 
ing undisturbed in their usual places. We were 
[i44] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

disposed to regard this demonstration as a 
gentle hint that our continuation in the house 
was not desired, and that the "spooks, " as we 
came familiarly to call them, had in furtherance 
of this idea gathered together such of our be- 
longings as they could reach in order to facili- 
tate our packing up for departure. But we 
paid no heed to the implied suggestion, restored 
the room to its former condition, and in a short 
time this particular form of annoyance was dis- 
continued. 

These were minor occurrences, ana I am not 
relating them with any reference to the order 
in which they came. As they seem to belong 
to the general run of phenomena that have been 
frequently noticed in accounts of "haunted 
houses" — so called — I will not dwell upon 
them; merely observing that the effort to pro- 
duce them was entirely misplaced if its purpose 
was to frighten us, and in any case unworthy 
of any intelligent source. I more than once an- 
nounced this opinion in a loud tone of voice 
when the rustlings and footfalls, and their often 
accompanying groans and sighs became too per- 
sistent, or wearisome in their lack of variety 
— and it was curious to see how effective this 
remonstrance always was. A dead silence 
would immediately ensue, and for hours, and 
[145] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

sometimes even for days, the house would be 
as orderly and commonplace as possible. 

It is my recollection that the mother of 
Deeming (if, indeed, she it were) made no fur- 
ther appearance after her son's execution. She 
seems to have expressed herself in one supreme 
and futile appeal for help, and then to have 
gone to her place. Several others followed 
her, whom I could hear from time to time as 
they moved about, and whom my wife, whose 
clearness of sight in these matters I never 
shared, described as an old woman, another 
much younger, and a girl-child some four or 
five years of age. They never attempted any 
communication with us; in fact, they seemed 
quite unaware of our presence; and were evi- 
dently not concerned in any of the bizarre and 
seemingly meaningless manifestations that were 
continually going on. We fancied that the 
shade of the elder woman was that of the 
former mistress of the house, whose death, as 
I have already noted, had occurred therein some 
three months before we took possession :— -but 
as she ignored us entirely, we respected her 
seeming disinclination to a mutual introduction, 
and left her to go to and fro in the way she 
preferred. This way was not altogether a 
pleasant one. She wore a black gown, my wife 

[i 4 6] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

said, with a neckerchief of some white material 
— the rustle of her gown, which I could plainly 
hear, indicated that it was of silk; she seemed 
unhappy (we thought it might be that she did 
not understand the absence of her husband and 
daughters) and was forever sighing softly and 
wringing her hands. The younger woman (the 
two never seemed to be conscious of each others' 
existence — if that is the right word) was in a 
state of evident discomfort also, although she 
was always silent, and appeared to be con- 
stantly in search of something she could not 
find. 

Altogether we found these shadowy guests 
of ours a rather cheerless company; but as we 
had had no voice in inviting them, and feared 
that their departure (if they should accept any 
intimation from us that it was desired) might 
make room for others even more objectionable, 
we were fain to adapt ourselves to the situa- 
tion that was forced upon us. The child-ghost, 
however, was of quite different disposition. 
She had something with her that seemed to take 
the place of a doll, and would sit with it by the 
hour in a corner of the room where we all 
were, at times crooning to it in a queer, far- 
away, but still quite audible voice. It was a 
"creepy" thing to hear, but strangely sweet and 

[147] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

musical, for all that. On rarer occasions she 
would sing to herself a song, but one in which 
no words could be distinguished; in all her ut- 
terances, indeed, there was never anything that 
sounded like speech. She was not quite sure of 
Herself in this song. Now and then she would 
strike a wrong note ; then silence for a moment, 
and she would begin the song again. As she 
reached the note at which she had before 
stumbled, she would pause, then take the note 
correctly, give a pleased little laugh, and go 
on successfully to the end. 

This extraordinary performance was re- 
peated on many occasions. One bright Sunday 
afternoon I was sitting in talk with my wife in 
her room, when this weird chant started up in 
the farthest corner. I listened through the 
whole of the usual rendition — the beginning, 
the false note, the return for a new trial, the 
note rightly struck, the satisfied laugh, and so 
on to the conclusion. Then the thing began all 
over again. 

I said, rather impatiently: "Don't sing that 
again ! Can't you see that we want to talk?" 

"Oh, you shouldn't have said that!" re- 
monstrated my wife. <( She has gone away" — 
and in fact the song had stopped, and it was 
many days before we heard it again. 

[i 4 8] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

I have not particularly mentioned our friend 
in this recital of minor happenings, although 
he had his share in most of them, and carried 
himself throughout in a plucky and admirable 
manner. We were very fond of him, as he evi- 
dently was of us to endure adventures with us 
which he must have found uncongenial, to say 
the least — he being a man of quiet tastes, and 
one not prone to go out of his way in search 
for excitement. An incident that happened one 
night, however, came very near to ending his 
residence with us. 

At about eight o'clock of an evening in Jane 
(the time of year when the days are at their 
shortest in that latitude), he and I were smok- 
ing and chatting in my "den," my wife being 
in her own room at the front of the house. All 
at once the two dogs who were chained in the 
back yard broke out in a terrific chorus of bark- 
ing. They were ordinarily very quiet animals, 
and whenever they gave tongue (which was 
only when some tradesman or other person 
came upon the premises by the back gate) it 
was merely by a yelp or two to inform us that 
they were attending to their duty as guardians. 
On this occasion, however, one might have 
thought there were a dozen dogs behind the 
house instead of two : — they seemed fairly 
[i49] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

frantic, and there was a strange note in their 
voices such as I had never heard before. 

"What on earth is the matter with those 
dogs?" I exclaimed. "One might think they 
were being murdered." 

"They are certainly tremendously excited 
about something," my companion rejoined: — 
"let's go out and see what the trouble is" — and 
he was out of the room, and unlocking the back 
door, before I could leave my easy-chair to 
accompany him. As I reached the hall I was 
just in time to see the large pane of ground- 
glass with which the upper half of the outside 
door was fitted, fly inward — shattered into a 
thousand pieces by a jagged fragment of rock 
as large as my fist, which whizzed by my 
friend's head with such force that :t went by 
me also, and brought up against the front door 
at the other end of the hall. My companion, 
who had escaped death or a serious injury by 
the smallest possible margin, fell back against 
the wall with his hands over his face, which had 
been cut in several places by the flying glass; 
but he quickly recovered himself, and when I 
had hastened back to my room and provided 
myself with a revolver, we rushed together into 
the open air. Nothing was to be seen, nor could 
we hear a sound. .We went into the street, 
[ISO] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

which was lighted by scattered gas lamps, and 
listened for retreating footsteps, but the street 
v/as vacant as far as we could see in both direc- 
tions, and the silence of the night was like that 
of the grave. We dragged the dogs out of the 
kennels to which they had retreated, and turned 
them loose in the hope that their peculiar in- 
telligence would enable them to guide us to 
some lurking miscreant in the shrubbery about 
the yard or amid the trees and vines in the ob- 
scurity of the orchard: — but they were tremb- 
ling as if in abject fear, we could get no help 
from them, and when released they bolted into 
their kennels again and hid themselves in the 
straw at the farthest corners. It was evident 
that they had seen something that terrified them 
greatly, but what it was we could only surmise. 
The Scotch terrier was a gentle creature, and 
his evident alarm did not so much surprise me. 
The fox-terrier, on the other hand, was full of 
"bounce" and confidence, and nothing in canine 
or human shape had any terrors for him. 
When it came to devils, that might be another 
matter — an idea that passed through my mind 
at the time, but did not then find lodgment. It 
was strengthened in view of another incident 
which occurred later, and which I shall describe 
in a subsequent chapter. 

[151] 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE DEAD WALKS 

The incident of the flying stone and the 
broken glass much disquieted us, and furnished 
matter of anxious discussion for several days. 
It gave us the first hint we had received that 
the influences that seemed to be busy about us 
included any of a malign or violent nature, and 
inspired a lively apprehension of other sinister 
happenings of which it might be the forerunner. 
There was, of course, the doubt as to whether 
the affair might not be due to human agency; 
had it stood by itself, no other idea would have 
occurred to us : — but although we tried to 
satisfy ourselves that some reckless or malicious 
person was the culprit, the attendant circum- 
stances seemed to point away from that opinion. 
The force with which the missile was hurled in- 
dicated that no mischievous boy could have 
aimed it, while it appeared incredible that any 
man would take the risk of passing the clamor- 
ous dogs and crossing the wide yard to take a 
point-blank shot at the door — as the direct 
course of the stone showed had been done. 

[152] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

Nor could it have been thrown from any con- 
siderable distance: — the laundry outhouse be- 
fore mentioned, was not more than thirty feet 
from the door and protected it from any attack 
outside that limit. It was the behavior of the 
dogs, however, that puzzled us the most. In- 
stead of welcoming our coming, as would 
naturally have been the case, they shrunk from 
the touch of our hands and gave no heed to 
our voices, but shook and shivered as if in an 
ague fit. 

In spite of these facts, the event so much 
smacked of the material, and was so opposed 
in its nature to anything else that had happened, 
that we hesitated to attribute it to the agency 
of unseen powers; and as the week that fol- 
lowed was free of any alarming incident we 
decided to keep it out of the debit column of 
our account with the "spooks," and give them 
the credit of having had no part in it. 

It was, I think (although I am uncertain 
about the exact date) about a fortnight after 
the stone-throwing episode, that I came home 
one afternoon much earlier than usual; and as 
my wife met me at the door I saw at once that 
look upon her face which had on several occa- 
sions advised me that something quite out of 

[153] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

the ordinary had happened during my absence. 
It is hardly necessary for me to mention, in 
view of the record already made of the ex- 
perience she had shared with me in that ill- 
omened house, that among her notable charac- 
teristics were high courage and self-control. 
On this occasion, however, her appearance 
alarmed me greatly. There was a presence of 
fear upon her; she was distraite and nervous, 
despite her evident effort to appear uncon- 
cerned; and the strange expression which I had 
often seen when her gaze seemed to follow the 
movements of shapes invisible to my grosser 
sense, still clouded her eyes. 

I did not at once question her, although I 
was consumed with curiosity, and tried to quiet 
her evident, although suppressed, excitement by 
talking of the commonplace incidents of my 
day in town. But it was apparent that she did 
not hear a word I said: — indeed, her attitude 
and manner were as of one who listened to 
another voice than mine; and I soon lapsed 
into silence and sat watching her with a grow- 
ing anxiety. 

Suddenly the obsession with which she 
seemed to be contending passed away: — she 
turned impulsively to me and cried: 

"We must leave this house ! I have endured 
[154] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

all I can ! I will not remain here another day !" 

"I knew that something was wrong the 
moment I saw you," I said. "Something very 
bad has happened — do you want to tell me what 
it is?" 

"Oh, I cannot, I cannot!" she exclaimed. 
"It is too horrible; it would frighten you to 
death if I should tell you!" 

"Anything that you have gone through, I 
ought to be able to hear of," I replied. "I 
think you had better tell me your story, and get 
it off your mind, before our friend comes 
home." 

"Oh, he must never know it!" she cried. 
"Promise me that you will not tell him!" 

"Of course I will not tell him, if you do not 
wish it," I assented. "And now let me know 
what has alarmed you." 

During our conversation I had imagined all 
sorts of terrifying incidents as having occurred 
— but my wife's next words sent a shiver 
through me. 

"Deeming has been here," she said. 

"Deeming!" I exclaimed; "that devil!" 

"Yes," she replied. "He did not try to harm 
me, but if there is a Hell he came from it. Oh, 
he is so wretched and unhappy! In spite of the 
horror of seeing him, I was never so sorry for 

[155] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

any creature in all my life. Just to look at him 
was enough to make me know what is meant 
by 'the torments of the damned' — such awful 
suffering ! I shall never get his sad and fright- 
ful face out of my mind!" — and she covered 
her face with her hands, as if still seeing the 
terrific vision that she had described. 

When she had partially recovered her com- 
posure, she began at the beginning and told me 
the whole story. It so impressed me that, even 
at this distance of time, I remember perfectly 
every detail of the narration, and almost its 
every word, and with this recollection I set it 
down. 

"It was about an hour before you came 
home," she began, and I was sewing at the 
front window of my room, when I heard the 
latch of the gate click. I looked up, and saw 
that someone was coming into the yard. It was 
a man — a peddler, I thought — and I w r ent to 
the door to tell him that I did not wish to buy 
anything. The door was open, although the 
outside screen door was shut and bolted. I had 
no idea at all that it was not a living human 
being; but when I got to the door and looked 
at the figure, which was standing just inside the 
gate and facing the house, I knew it was nothing 
that belonged to this world. It was misty and 

[156] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

indistinct, and I could not make out any de- 
tails of face or costume, except that the clothes 
seemed mean and cheap. 

U I don't know how long I stood there," she 
continued, after a pause; "but by-and-by the 
Thing began to come toward me up the walk. 
It didn't seem exactly to walk — it just moved, 
I cannot tell you how; and as it got nearer, al- 
though I couldn't distinguish the features, I 
began to see the clothes quite clearly." 

"What were the clothes like?" I here inter- 
rupted. 

"They were the strangest-looking things I 
ever saw on anybody," she replied. "There 
was no style or fit to them, and they seemed 
more like clothes made of flour sacks than any- 
thing else — very coarse and ungainly. And an 
odd thing about them was that they had queer 
triangular black designs on them here and there. 
But the cap the figure wore was the strangest 
thing of all: — it was of dingy white cloth and 
fitted close to the head, and it had a sort of 
flap hanging down behind almost to the shoul- 
ders: — what did you say?" — for I had uttered 
a sudden ejaculation. 

"Nothing," I replied: — "please go on." 

"Well," she continued, "the figure came up 
to the two steps leading to the veranda, and I 
[157] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

think it would have come up to the door; but 
I said, 'StopF and it stood still where it was. 
It was still indistinct, and I felt as though it 
strained my eyes to see it; the face was vague, 
and did not seem like any face I had ever seen 
before. 

"I said: Who are you, and what do you 
want?' 

"The Thing held out something it had in its 
hand, but I couldn't make out what it was, and 
made the strangest reply. It said: 'Madame, 
do you want to buy some soap?' " 

"Gracious powers!" I exclaimed: — "It was 
Deeming? — and he asked you to buy soap?" 

"I did not know it was Deeming until later," 
replied my wife; "but I have told you what he 
said in his exact words. What could he mean 
by offering to sell me soap?" 

"I have an idea about that which I will tell 
you of presently. But first let me hear the rest 
of the story." 

"Well," she went on, "I told him I did not 
want any soap. 'But,' he said, 'I must sell some, 
and I beg of you to buy it' — and when I again 
refused, his voice took on the saddest, most 
pathetic tone, and he said: *I thought you 
would. You were kinder to me when you saw 
me in the jail.' 'I never saw you before in my 

[158] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

life!' I said — for truly I did not recognize 
him even then ; but he said : 'Oh, yes, you have, 
and you tried to get Miss Rounsfell to come 
and see me.' 'What!' I cried; 'are you Deem- 
ing?' — and he said: 'Yes, madame, I am that 
unfortunate man.' 

"I don't quite know what I said after that. 
I felt as though I should die of fright, and I 
think I screamed to him to go away, that the 
thought of his dreadful crimes horrified me so 
that I could not look at him, and that he must 
never come to me again. He looked at me re- 
proachfully and turned away. I watched him 
go to the gate, open it as anyone might have 
done, and close it after him — then he vanished 
instantly, the moment he had got into the 
street. But I know he'll be back! He is suf- 
fering, and I am the only one he can reach. I 
don't know what he wants, but I cannot see 
him again. It will kill me or drive me mad 
if we stay here !" 

I certainly felt that I had parted with my 
own wits by the time this astounding tale was 
concluded. It was so awful in its facts and in 
its suggestions, its details combined in such a 
mixture of the hideous and the grotesque, that 
I looked anxiously at my wife in the fear that 

[159] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

what I personally knew to have taken place in 
the house had upset her mind, and produced 
this dreadful hallucination. But how to attri- 
bute to hallucination certain items in the story 
which referred to facts with which / was ac- 
quainted, but of which she was ignorant until 
her experience of the afternoon had revealed 
them to her? 

At her express desire I had told her nothing 
of the execution which I had witnessed, and 
she had strictly refrained from reading about 
it in the newspapers: — yet she had described 
accurately, and in all its details, the garb he 
wore on the scaffold — the uncouth trousers and 
jacket of sacking, stamped with the "Broad 
Arrow" that marked both it and its wearer to 
be the property of the Crown, and the ghastly 
"death cap," with its pendent flap behind which 
was pulled forward and dropped over his face 
just before the trap was sprung! 

And the soap! — that, as I explained to her, 
seemed the most gruesome feature of all. My 
theory regarding it may have been fanciful : — 
yet what was this poor bedeviled ghost more 
likely to have with him than a sample of the 
material that had been used upon the rope 
that hung him, to make it smooth and pliant, 
and swift of action in the noose? 

[i 60] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

But why had he wished to sell it, and what 
help could he hope to gain thereby? He had 
evidently come, not to frighten, but to crave 
relief from some distressed condition, and 
when he failed to gain it he had gone away 
disappointed, but in sorrow rather than in 
anger. 

When morning came, after a night of which 
we spent the greater part in discussion of this 
new and disconcerting development, my wife 
surprised me by saying that she had changed 
her mind about leaving the house, and had de- 
cided to remain. I strongly remonstrated 
against her exposing herself to a more than 
possible danger, but she continued firm in her 
resolution — said she was convinced that the 
apparition had no purpose to harm or even 
alarm her, and that it might be her duty, as 
It would certainly be her effort, if it came again, 
to ascertain the cause of its disquiet, and, if 
possible, remove it. 

This decision caused me great uneasiness for 
several days : — but as the spectre did not return 
I began to think that its first visit was also its 
last, and began to interest myself anew in the 
cantrips with which the house goblins continued 
to amuse themselves and mystify us. 

[161] 



CHAPTER IX 

THE GOBLINS OF THE KITCHEN 

Among the things that impressed us amid 
the general goings-on about the house was the 
evidence of a certain sort of humor in the make- 
up of the influences that were seemingly respon- 
sible for them. That this humor did not 
particularly appeal to our taste, I must admit; 
it seemed distinctly lacking in subtlety, and sug- 
gested that its authors might be the spirits of 
certain disembodied low comedians of the 
bladder-and-slapstick variety. To some such 
agency, at least, we came to attribute the phe- 
nomena of the slamming doors, jingling door 
bell, and occasional upsetting of the parlor: 
and from time to time other things occurred to 
break this monotony of elfish sprightliness, and 
to show us that our spookish friends were not 
mere creatures of routine, but were full of 
waggish resource. The indoor incidents that I 
have already narrated may seem to have borne 
the ancient ghostly — or "poltergeistic" — trade- 
mark, and to have been contrived and employed 
after a conventional and long-approved plan: 

[162] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

— but if there is anywhere a Shadowland Patent 
Office, the originators of the pranks I am about 
to describe should be enjoying its protection 
for their ingenious inventions. 

I was sitting in my room at about noon, one 
day, awaiting a call to the luncheon which my 
wife was preparing. Suddenly I heard her call 
out from the front hall: "Come here, quick! 
I have something queer to show you !" I went 
out at once, and found her standing at the door 
of the dark chamber I have previously de- 
scribed, wherein we were accustomed to keep 
milk, butter, and other such provisions, for the 
sake of coolness. 

"Look in there," said my wife — and I looked 
in accordingly; but I observed nothing unusual, 
and so reported. 

"Look up," she said again. I did so, and 
saw a large milk pan resting motionless in the 
air just under the ceiling several feet above my 
head and just beneath the perforated opening 
of the ventilator. I naturally inquired how it 
had got there. 

"I hardly know," replied my wife; "the thing 
was done so quickly. The pan is full of milk, 
and was resting on the floor of the hollow space 
when I came to get some of the milk for our 
lunch. I had taken up the pan, when it was 

[163] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

snatched from my hands and floated up to the 
place where you now see it." 

"This is something new," I remarked, "and 
rather interesting. I hope the spooks are not 
drinking the milk" — and as I spoke, the pan 
began deliberately to descend. When it was 
within reach I caught hold of the handle on 
each side, and tried to accelerate its motion. 
It stopped immediately, and although I em- 
ployed considerable force I could not budge it. 
(The effect was not at all as if I were pulling 
against a physical force like my own; the pan 
was as immovable and inert as though it were 
a component part of the masonry of the 
chamber about it.) I stood aside, therefore; 
whereupon it began to float down again, and 
shortly settled in its former place on the floor, 
touching it so lightly that the contact did not 
cause even a ripple upon the surface of the 
milk. We tasted that milk very carefully 
before venturing to use it for our repast, but 
found nothing wrong with it. 

A few evenings after the episdde of the 
levitating milk pan, we all three went into Mel- 
bourne after dinner to attend the theatre. After 
the performance and while on the way to our 
train we passed a cook-shop, in whose window 

Ti6 4 ] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

was displayed a quantity of roasted duck and 
teal, the game season then being at its height. 
They looked so appetizing that I was moved to 
go in and purchase a pair of teal for a shilling 
or two (these birds were astonishingly plenti- 
ful, and correspondingly cheap in Australia at 
the time), had them put into a paper box, and 
carried them home with the view to a light sup- 
per before we should go to bed. As it seemed 
hardly worth while to use the dining-room, we 
went into the kitchen; where I put the teal on 
a platter and prepared to carve them while my 
wife was arranging the plates and necessary 
cutlery. The carving knife was in its usual 
place in the knife-box, but I could not find the 
fork that went with it, and so remarked. 

"Why," said my wife, "it's there with the 
knife, of course. " She spoke with conviction 
and authority, for among her conspicuous traits 
was a love for orderliness in all things pertain- 
ing to the household. 

Nevertheless, the fork was not there; nor 
could we find it, although we overhauled every- 
thing in the cupboard in search for it. Mean- 
while our friend, actuated by the laudable pur- 
pose of keeping out of the way of our prepa- 
rations, was standing near the door, with his 
hands in his pockets. 

[165] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

"I see it!" he suddenly exclaimed, and with- 
drawing one hand from its confinement, he 
pointed upward. My eye followed the direc- 
tion thus indicated, and I also saw the missing 
utensil : — it was stuck into the upper part of the 
window casing, just under the ceiling, and a 
folded paper was impaled upon its tines. I got 
upon the table and took the fork from its posi- 
tion. It required considerable force to do so, 
for the tines were deeply imbedded in the wood- 
work. Then I unfolded the paper. It was 
about four inches square, and drawn upon it, 
with much spirit and a strict adherence to the 
principles of realism in art, were a skull and 
crossbories. These were done in a red medium 
which at first we thought was blood, but which 
we finally decided to be ink, since it retained its 
color for weeks, and did not darken, as blood 
would have done. There was no writing what- 
ever on the sheet; therefore we had no reason 
to regard it as an attention from the "Black 
Hand" — another reason being that we had 
never heard of the "Black Hand" at that time. 
We had no red ink in the house, nor any paper 
like that upon which the design was drawn — 
and nothing ever occurred to throw any light 
on the matter. 

This incident — like that of the hurled stone 
[166] 






THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

— seemed so palpably referable to human 
agency that it revived the rather feeble hope 
we had from time to time entertained that we 
might, after all, be the victims of some in- 
genious trickery. Therefore our friend and I 
devoted one afternoon to a close search of the 
house, outhouse, and the premises generally, 
particularly exploring the dusty attic for con- 
cealed machinery — in short, for anything that 
might give a clue to the mystery. We emerged 
from the attic looking like a couple of sweeps, 
but this was the only result achieved; nor did 
we accomplish anything else in all our investiga- 
tions. As for the attic, nobody could get into 
it otherwise than by bringing the ladder into 
the house from the outhouse and raising it to 
the trap-door in the ceiling of the bathroom. 
As to outside origin of the various pranks that 
had been played upon us, we could see no way 
in which they could be performed in view of 
the fact that we had every facility to observe the 
approach of any mischief-maker: — since we 
had a wide street on two sides of us, and the 
houses on each of the other two sides were at 
least a hundred yards away. The fact that 
most of the "manifestations" with which we 
had been favored had occurred in the daytime 
added to the puzzle; the only two things that 

[167] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

we could explain as perhaps the work of beings 
like ourselves (the episodes of the thrown 
stone and of the fork) had occurred under the 
cover of darkness : — therefore, hoping that, 
with these data to go upon, we might get to the 
cause of our annoyances, we set a trap with the 
hope that if any practical joker were at work, 
he might walk into it. 

In furtherance of this purpose I sent my wife 
and our friend to the theatre, a few evenings 
later, accompanying them to the railway station 
after extinguishing all the lights in the house in 
order to create the impression in the mind of 
any possible watcher of our movements that we 
were all three equally on pleasure bent in town, 
and returning by a devious route which finally 
brought me by a scramble over the orchard 
fence to the back door. I quietly let myself 
into the house, arranged an easy chair at a 
point where I could command the hall in both 
directions, and sat down amid utter darkness, 
with my revolver in my jacket pocket and my 
shot gun, heavily charged in both barrels, across 
my knees. I was fully determined to test the 
materiality — or otherwise — of any shape that 
might present itself, by turning my artillery 
loose thereon without any preliminary word of 
challenge; but although my vigil lasted until 
[168] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

midnight, I was oBliged to report to my return- 
ing companions that nothing whatever had hap- 
pened. 

I may add that that evening was the longest 
and least agreeable I ever experienced. 

It may be that the incident with which I shall 
close this rather rambling chapter was promoted 
by the same humorists who devised the conceit 
of the floating milk pan, and was employed as 
a means of enabling us to recognize therein the 
authors of the former whimsicality. The two 
pleasantries seemed, at all events, to have been 
conceived in the same spirit, and although both 
were equally odd and purposeless, the superior 
elaborateness of the second distinctly showed 
an advance over the first, and gained our ap- 
plause accordingly. There was no connection 
between these episodes in point of time; in 
fact, the second occurred several months after 
the first, in the hottest part of the year. 

Our friend being a Briton by birth and an 
Australian by adoption, he had enjoyed rather 
a narrow experience in dietetics, particularly in 
the vegetable line. During the early part of 
our housekeeping we had found much difficulty 
in securing for our table any garden delicacies 
outside the conventional list of potatoes, "vege- 

[i6 9 ] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

table marrow," and cauliflower — until Provi- 
dence brought to our back door an amiable 
Chinese huckster, who, with several com- 
patriots, had established a small truck-farm in 
the neighborhood. Earnest representations re- 
garding our vegetableless conditions inspired 
his interest, and the promise of good prices 
awakened his cupidity; and as a result of the 
agreement of these motives it was not long 
before our table greatly improved. 

And I cannot help saying — although this is 
a digression — that our often-expressed words 
of satisfaction to our purveyor stimulated him 
to produce and bring to us everything of the 
best that he could raise. In his way he was an 
artist, with an artist's craving for praise — so 
that now and then he would appear with a gift 
of some new product for us to try, and occa- 
sionally with a small packet of choice tea or 
some other Celestial delicacy, for which he 
would invariably refuse payment. 

"You should not bring me these things," my 
wife said to him one day. "You can't afford 
them." 

"Me likee bling 'em," he replied. "An' me 
likee you. You no ploud. Mos' lady too 
ploud" — and swinging his baskets to his shoul- 
der he departed. 

[170] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

It was my wife's delight to tempt our friend's 
appetite with all sorts of culinary novelties, 
which the new and more liberal order of things 
allowed her to prepare. With true British con- 
servatism he would venture gingerly upon an 
unfamiliar dish, admit it "wasn't half bad," 
and end by eating as much of it as both of us 
others together. It was finally discovered that 
a particularly effective way of appeal to his 
nature was through the medium of baked 
stuffed tomatoes : — of these he seemed never to 
have enough, and, as a consequence, they were 
frequently upon our bill-of-fare during the 
summer. It seems incredible — and lamentable 
— that a man should have got well into the 
fifties without ever having eaten a baked stuffed 
tomato: — such, however, was our friend's un- 
happy case, and my wife made strenuous efforts 
to ameliorate it. 

"I have a treat for you to-night," she said 
to our friend. "Guess what it is." 

"Baked stuffed tomatoes," he responded 
promptly — and baked stuffed tomatoes it was. 

"Now," continued my wife, "you two men 
must eat your dinner in the kitchen to-night. 
The woman who cooks for me is ill to-day, and 
you will have to take pot-luck. I have let the 
fire in the stove go out, and have been using 

[171] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

the gas range; so you will find the kitchen 
cooler than the dining-room, and by eating there 
you will save me work, besides." 

So we went into the kitchen, where we found 
the table already laid for us. 

"Before we sit down," said my wife, turning 
smilingly to our friend, "I am going to show 
you the treat you were so clever in guessing. 
But you are not to have it at once; that will 
come after the cold meat. The tomatoes are 
nice and hot, and I have put them in here to 
keep them from cooling too fast:" — and with 
these words she kneeled upon the floor and 
opened the iron door which shut in a wide but 
shallow cavity in the masonry that formed the 
base of the open fireplace. 

This fireplace was an unusual feature in a 
modern kitchen, and we, at least, had never 
put it to any use. It projected slightly into the 
room, and on the sides of it, and against the 
wall in each case, were, respectively, the cook 
stove and gas range. Under its hearth, and but 
a few inches above the level of the room, was 
the hollow space I have mentioned — I believe 
it was what is sometimes called a "Dutch 
oven" — eight inches high, perhaps, two feet 
wide, and eighteen inches deep. From this 
space my wife partly drew out for our inspeo 
[172] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

tion an iron baking pan, in which an even dozen 
of deliriously cooked, golden-and-red, crumb- 
stuffed tomatoes were sociably shouldering each 
other: — then, after hearing our expressions of 
satisfaction with their appearance, she pushed 
the pan back again, closed the iron door, and 
sat down with us to dinner. 

The table stood against the wall, directly 
under the window. My wife was seated at the 
end next to the fireplace, I was opposite her, 
and our friend was at the side, his back to the 
hall door and his face to the window. Thus he 
and my wife were each within two feet of the 
fireplace and the chamber under it, and the iron 
door guarding our treasure was in direct range 
of my own eyes from the position I occupied. 

Having despatched the earlier portions of 
the repast, my wife arose, removed the used 
dishes to a side table, set others in their places, 
and with the remark: "Now for the to- 
matoes !" swung open the iron door under the 
fireplace. The interior, however, was abso- 
lutely empty: — the tomatoes, and the heavy 
baking pan that had held them, had disap- 
peared! 

Our friend and I sprang from our chairs in 
astonishment and incredulity — but the fact was 
undoubted; the treat which had been so much 
[173] 



TRUE TALES OF THE' WEIRD 

anticipated had been snatched, as it were, from 
our very lips. Our friend turned from one to 
the other of us a face so comically set between 
wonder and disappointment that I burst out 
laughing in spite of myself. But my ill-timed 
levity was promptly checked by my wife, who 
was at the moment giving a competent imita- 
tion of a lioness robbed of her whelps. 

"Oh!" she cried, seemingly addressing noth- 
ing in particular, although she might have felt 
— as I did — that she was speaking to a derisive 
audience; "that is too bad of you! To steal 
my tomatoes, when I worked over them so 
long! Bring them back instantly!" But they 
remained invisible, and over all a sarcastic 
silence brooded. Then she turned upon us un- 
fortunate men. 

"Have you been playing me a trick?" she 
demanded. "Do you know what has become 
of those tomatoes?" "Certainly not" — this to 
both questions. Neither of us had moved from 
his chair since we sat down to dinner and she 
had shown us the pan and its contents. Nor 
had she, for that matter, except when she had 
risen to change the dishes, and even then she 
had not left the room. 

All that could be said was that the tomatoes 
had been exhibited, and then had been shut up 

[174] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

again behind the door. There was no possible 
doubt about that — it was equally certain that 
they had vanished. Very well, then let us 
search for them ! This we did, and with great 
thoroughness, all over the house, and in every 
part of the grounds ; the outhouse at the back 
was also carefully inspected. I even got the 
ladder and went, in turn, upon the roofs of 
both structures, looked down the chimneys :- — 
"nothing doing" (to employ an Oriental ex- 
pression not then, unhappily, in use) ; nowhere 
any trace of the missing pan or of the tomatoes. 

We gave it up finally, and went back to our 
dessert and coffee. My wife refused to be 
satisfied that the tomatoes were actually gone. 
She was constantly getting up to open the iron 
door and view the emptiness behind it — as if 
she expected the apparent dematerialization of 
the pan and tomatoes to be reversed, — while 
our friend looked on with an aspect of forced 
resignation. 

I left them after a time, and went out for an 
after-dinner smoke on the back doorstep. I 
had hardly lighted my pipe when I heard a cry 
blended of two voices in the kitchen— -a shriek 
from my wife, and a mildly profane ejaculation 
from our friend. Rushing in, I saw an aston- 
ishing sight — our friend, with staring eyes and 

[175] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

blanched face, supporting himself against the 
table as if staggered by a blow, my wife kneel- 
ing in front of the open iron door beneath the 
fireplace, and the baking pan and its dozen 
tomatoes lying before her on the floor! 

It was some time before I could get a co- 
herent account of what had happened. It was 
finally developed, however, that after I had left 
the room the conversation continued on the 
inexplicable conduct of the tomatoes. "I can't 
believe they are not there I" my wife asserted, 
and, for the dozenth time or so, she again knelt 
on the floor and again opened the door. 

"I was standing right behind her," said our 
friend, "and saw her swing the door open, but 
there was nothing inside. At the same instant 
I heard a thump on the floor, and there the 
whole outfit was, just in front of her. I don't 
know where the things came from — perhaps 
down the chimney: — at any rate, one moment 
there was nothing there ; the next, the pan and 
the tomatoes were on the floor." 

After we had regained our composure we 
considered what we should do with the to- 
matoes. Our friend said he didn't think he 
wanted any of them, and I confessed to an 
equal indifference — so capricious, and often in- 
fluenced by slight circumstances, is the appetite ! 

[i 7 6] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

My wife, as usual, settled the matter. "Take 
them away!" she said. "Throw them into the 
garbage barrel !" — which was accordingly done ; 
melancholy end of a culinary triumph ! Yet we 
ought at least to have tasted those tomatoes: 
under the title "tomato a la diable" they might 
have found a place in the cook books. 



[177] 



CHAPTER X 

A SPECTRAL BURGLARY 

I cannot but consider it an interesting cir- 
cumstance that the varied happenings in the 
House on the Hill seemed to arrange them- 
selves into two rather strictly defined classes 
— the sportive and the terrible — and that the 
respective influences responsible for them ap- 
peared carefully to refrain from interfering 
with each others' functions or prerogatives. As 
among our earthly acquaintances we number 
some who are entirely deficient in appreciation 
of the ridiculous, and others so flippant as to 
have no sense of the serious, so, it seemed to 
us, the unseen friends who so diversely made 
their presence known were in like manner to 
be differentiated. 

In this connection another singular fact is 
to be noted. While the clownish performers in 
the juggling of the milk pan, the prestidigita- 
tion of the baked stuffed tomatoes, and other 
such specialties, always remained invisible, even 
to my wife, what I may call the more dramatic 

[178] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

manifestations were accompanied by appari- 
tions that were the evident actors in them. It 
also occurred to us that if the "acts" that were 
staged for our benefit were to be regarded as 
presenting what passed for entertainment in 
the Dark World, there must be drawn there, 
as here, a sharp line of distinction between 
vaudeville and "the legitimate;" incidentally, 
too, it would seem that ghostly audiences were 
like many in the flesh in their capacity for 
being easily entertained. 

, However that may be, we somehow came to 
the opinion that while the more impressive of 
the phenomena with which we were favored 
appeared to be due to the action of beings that 
had aforetime been upon the earth — for in 
every such case the attending spectres were to 
be identified as simulacra of persons whose pre- 
vious existence was known to some one (and 
generally all) of us, — the tricksy antics that 
seemed to come from Nowhere might find their 
impulse in elementary entities or forces which 
had not yet exercised their activities upon the 
earth plane (and, indeed, might never be in- 
tended to do so), and thus had never assumed 
a material form. I do not put this forward as 
a theory, but simply as a passing impression 
that lightly brushed our minds: — and to repel 
[179] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

the temptation of being led into the seductive 
regions of speculation, I will re-assume my role 
as a mere narrator of facts and describe a quite 
inexplicable affair that occurred near the close 
of our tenancy. 

The bedroom which I have before described 
as being at the front of the house, with two win- 
dows overlooking the veranda, was occupied 
at night by my wife and myself. Between the 
windows was a ponderous mahogany dressing 
table, surmounted by a large mirror. This 
article of furniture was so broad that it ex- 
tended on either side beyond the inner casing 
of the windows, and so heavy that it required 
the united strength of both of us to move it — 
as, during the cleaning of the room, we some- 
times had to do. The windows were pro- 
tected by wire screens, secured by stout bolts 
which were shot into sockets in the woodwork, 
and fitted flush with the surface of the outer 
window casing. In February — the time of 
which I am writing — the weather was at its 
hottest, and we slept at night with the windows 
open, trusting our security to the strong wire 
screens. 

One morning, after an untroubled night's 
sleep, I awoke soon after sunrise, and from my 
[i 80] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

place in bed, nearest the window, looked lazily 
out upon the day. Still half-asleep, I lay for 
some time without noting anything unusual; 
but as my sensibilities revived I observed that 
the screen was missing from the left-hand win- 
dow, and that the dressing table, instead of 
standing in its usual place against the wall, was 
turned half-way around, and projected at right 
angles into the room. I was out of bed in an 
instant, and at the window — looking out of 
which I saw the screen lying flat on the floor 
of the veranda. I went out and examined it. 
It was uninjured, and the bolts still projected 
from either side to show that they had not been 
drawn; but two deep grooves in the woodwork 
of the casing indicated that the screen had 
been dragged outward from its place. How 
this damage could have been done to the stout 
casing, without marring in the least the com- 
paratively light frame of the screen, I could by 
no means understand — particularly as there 
was no possible way by which one could get a 
hold upon the outside of the screen except by 
the use of screws or gimlets to act as holds for 
one's hands ; and of these there were no marks 
whatever. 

I had made this examination so quietly that 
I had not awakened my wife : — now, however, 
[181] 



TRUE TALES OFTHE WEIRD 

I returned to the bedroom and aroused her. 

Her first thought, on seeing the condition of 
affairs, was that burglars had visited us: — my 
idea had been the same until I had observed the 
peculiar facts that I have just noted. Tacitly 
accepting this theory for the moment, I 
assisted her in making an inventory of our 
portable valuables. While I satisfied myself 
that my purse and watch were safe, my wife 
took her keys from under the pillow (where 
she always kept them at night) and went to the 
dressing table, in one of whose drawers was 
her jewel box. The drawer was locked, and 
so was the jewel box, and the latter, on being 
opened, seemed to hold all its usual contents 
intact. 

"No," she said, after mentally checking off 
the various articles; "everything is here; noth- 
ing has been taken. Wait! I am wrong; one 
thing is missing. Do you remember that 
rhinestone brooch in the shape of a butterfly 
you bought for me one evening in Paris, four 
years ago?" 

"Why, yes," I replied; "I got it in a shop 
under the arcades on the Rue de Rivoli, and 
paid five francs for it. You don't mean to say 
that the thieves, or our friends the 'spooks,' or 
whoever it may be, have taken that trifle and 

[182] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

left your diamond rings and other things really 
valuable untouched !" 

Yet such appeared to be the case— the cheap 
and unimportant brooch was the only thing 
unaccounted for, nor had anything else been dis- 
turbed throughout the house. It seemed in- 
credible that any burglar who had passed merely 
the kindergarten stage of schooling in his pro- 
fession could have been deceived into suppos- 
ing that this commonplace article de Paris had 
any value; besides, why should this have been 
taken and the real jewelry that lay with it in 
the same box have been left? And how had it 
been extracted from the locked box inside the 
locked dressing table? The keys of both were 
on the same ring under my wife's pillow, and 
although a robber might extract them without 
awaking her, it seemed unreasonable to suppose 
he would take the additional risk of replacing 
them when he had completed his work. But 
for these and other questions that presented 
themselves we could find no satisfactory an- 
swers. 

We ate our breakfast in a state of mild ex- 
pectation that the brooch might be returned as 
mysteriously as it had been taken. The ad- 
venture seemed to be constructed on lines 
similar to those laid down in the affair of the 

[183] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

baked stuffed tomatoes, and we were disposed 
to credit it to the same agency; — -but if the 
sprites who were responsible for the former 
prank had contrived this later one also, they 
either intended to carry it no further, or were 
preparing a different denouement. This last 
conjecture proved to be the true one, but we 
had to wait a long time for the fact to be de- 
veloped. 

We gave our "spooks" sufficient time to con- 
summate their joke (if, indeed, they were re- 
sponsible for it), and finally concluding that 
they were not inclined to embrace the oppor- 
tunity, we again took under consideration the 
burglar theory, and I went to the local police 
station to report the occurrence. Two heavy- 
weight constables returned with me to the house 
and gravely inspected the premises. Their 
verdict was speedy and unanimous : — "House- 
breakers." There had been similar breakings- 
and-enterings in the town recently — therefore 
the facts were obvious. I showed them the 
drawer and jewel box, and described the sin- 
gular and modest spoil of the supposed thieves; 
I also exhibited the unmarred frame of the 
screen and the scarred window casing, and 
asked them how they explained that. This 
puzzled them, but they fell back easily upon the 

[i8 4 ] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

obvious and practical. "Housebreakers," they 
repeated. 'We shall make a report" — and 
marched away as ponderously as they had 
come. I did not acquaint them with the goings- 
on in that house for a year past: — had I done 
so, my prompt apprehension as a suspicious 
character would doubtless have followed. 

In July of the following year I went from 
Philadelphia, where I was then living, to spend 
a few days with my wife at Savin Rock (near 
New Haven, Connecticut), where I had rented 
a cottage for the summer. The morning after 
my arrival I was awakened by my wife, who 
had risen but the moment before, and who, as 
I opened my eyes, exclaimed excitedly: "Look! 
Look at what is on the bureau !" Following 
with my eyes the direction of her pointed finger, 
I saw upon the bureau the pin-cushion into 
which I had stuck my scarf pin the night before, 
beside which, and in the centre of the cushion, 
appeared the butterfly brooch which I had last 
previously seen in Australia, sixteen months 
before! 

"Where did you find it?" I asked, forgetting 
for the moment, and in my half-awake condi- 
tion, the incident in which it had figured as 
above described. 

[135] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

"I didn't find it," my wife replied; "it is less 
than a minute ago that I saw it. It was not on 
the pin cushion last night; how in the world 
did it come here?" — "And from where?" — 
thus I completed the question. 

Neither of us had any reply to this: — so I 
merely advanced the suggestion that it was 
pleasant to think that our spookish friends had 
not altogether forgotten us, although on our 
part we had no desire to cultivate their better 
acquaintance. This expression of sentiment 
may have had its effect: — at any rate, with the 
return of the brooch came an end to the mys- 
tery of 'The House on the Hill." 



^ 



S 



A^\ 










[186] 



CHAPTER XI 
"rest, rest, perturbed spirit!" 

I think it was because such lighter incidents 
as those that I have described in the two pre- 
ceding chapters were freely introduced among 
more weighty happenings, and thus gave a cer- 
tain measure of relief from them, that we man- 
aged to fill out our term in the House on the 
Hill. Absurd and impish as the general run 
of these performances was, there was still an 
element of what I may almost call intimacy in 
them — a sort of appeal, as it were, to look 
upon the whole thing as a joke; which, while 
they caused us amazement, brought us no real 
alarm. Much as has been attributed to the 
influence of fear, I believe curiosity to be the 
stronger passion; and few days passed without 
a fillip being given to our interest by some new 
absurdity, while events of graver suggestion 
were few and far between. 

I need not say that the affair which had been 
most sinister and disquieting was the coming 
to my wife of the evident apparition of Deem- 
ing. This visitation had been so awful and un- 

[187] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

earthly that by tacit agreement we had not 
spoken of it since the afternoon of its occur- 
rence : — yet I had never been able to get it out 
of my mind, and every day I spent in town was 
darkened by forebodings of what might happen 
at home before my return. Each night as I 
came in sight of the house I looked anxiously 
for the figure of my wife standing on the 
veranda to welcome me, and each night I drew 
a breath of relief as I saw in her serene and 
smiling face that my apprehensions had been 
vain; and so I came by degrees to dismiss my 
fears in the conviction that that uneasy spirit 
had been laid at last. 

But this comforting assurance suddenly 
failed me, when, one evening about two weeks 
after the ghost's first coming, I read in my 
wife's eyes that it had appeared again. Yet, 
greatly to my relief, I saw no fear in them, but, 
rather, an expression of pity. Her manner was 
quiet and composed, but I was sure she had 
been weeping. 

"Yes," she said, in reply to my anxious in- 
quiries; "Deeming has been here, and I have 
been crying. Oh, that poor tortured, despair- 
ing soul! — he is in Hell, and one infinitely 
worse than that we were taught to believe in; a 
Hell where conscience never sleeps, and where 
[188] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

he sees what he might have been — and now 
never can be! He frightened me terribly at 
first, but I know he tried not to do so, and now 
I am glad he came, for I believe I have helped 
him, although I cannot understand how. I feel 
weak and faint, for I have been under a great 
strain, but I shall be better now that you have 
come home — and I know, too, that I shall never 
see him again. Come into my room, and I 
will tell you all about it:" — and when I had 
done so, and had tried, with some success, to 
quiet the agitation that, in spite of her words, 
still possessed her, she told me the amazing 
story of her experience. 

"It was about eleven o'clock this forenoon," 
she began, "and I was alone in the house — in 
the kitchen. I had been airing the house, and 
all the doors and windows were open, although 
the screens were in place. All at once I heard 
the back gate creak as it always does when it 
opens, and 'Schneider' and 'Tokio' " (such 
were the names of our two dogs) "who were 
loose in the yard, barking at somebody. I sup- 
posed it was the butcher or the grocery man 
and looked out the back door — and just then 
the dogs came tearing by with their tails be- 
tween their legs, and disappeared around the 
corner of the house. The next instant I saw 

[i8 9 ] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

a man standing just inside the gate. He was 
not looking at me, but his eyes seemed to be 
following the flight of the dogs; then they 
turned to meet mine, and I saw that it was 
Deeming. I shut the back door instantly and 
locked it — then ran to the front door and 
fastened that; I wanted to close and bolt the 
windows, too, but did not dare do so, for I was 
afraid I might look out of any one of them 
and see him. I prayed to God that he might 
go away, but he did not. I stood in the hall 
and saw him move by outside the window of 
your room. By-and-by he passed the dining- 
room window on the other side of me as I stood 
there, having gone completely around the 
house. But he did not look in. 

"I did not see anything more of him for 
some time, and I began to think that he had 
given up trying to communicate with me, and 
had gone away again. I finally went into the 
bedroom and peeped out into the veranda. He 
was there, standing near and facing the door! 
He did not seem to notice me, and I watched 
him for some time. He was dressed just as 
he had been before, and looked the same; but 
I could see him much more clearly than the first 
time, and if I had not known who it was, I 
should have thought it was a living man. 
[190] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

"I don't know how it was, but as I stood 
watching him I found that I wasn't afraid of 
him at all. He looked so sad and pitiful, and 
stood there so patiently, that I began to feel 
as I might toward some poor beggar; he seemed 
just like one, waiting for something to eat. 
Then I thought how he had pleaded the other 
day for assistance, and how I had turned him 
away — and although it was like death to face 
him again, I went into the hall and opened the 
door. 

"The screen door was closed and locked, and 
we looked at each other through it. I could see 
every detail of the figure's face and dress as it 
stood there in the bright sunlight: — it was 
within three feet of me, and it was Deeming's 
without a shadow of a doubt. 

"I don't know how long I stood there. I 
seemed to be in another world, and in a strange 
atmosphere which he may have brought with 
him. I had to make a strong effort, but finally 
succeeded in seeing and thinking clearly, and as 
he only looked appealingly at me and seemed 
not to be able to say anything, I was the first 
to speak. 

11 'I know who you are, this time,' I said. *I 
told you never to come here again. Why have 
you done so?' 

[191] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

" 'Madame,' he replied, 'I have come for 
help.' 

" 'I told you the other day I could do nothing 
for you,' I said. 

" 'But you can, if you will,' he answered, 'and 
there is nobody else I can reach. Don't be 
afraid of me — I won't hurt you. I need some 
one to show me Christian charity, and I thought 
you were kind and would help me.' " 

" 'Christian charity!' " I exclaimed, inter- 
rupting the recital for the first time: "was that 
what he said?" 

"Those were his exact words," said my wife; 
"and it seemed almost blasphemy for such a 
creature to use them." 

"They seem to me," I commented, "more 
like one of those stock phrases of which nearly 
every man has some, of one sort or another. 
Do you remember, in the letter Deeming wrote 
to you from the jail when you could not induce 
Miss Rounsfell to come to see him, how he 
said he was sorry you did not find her 'as Chris- 
tianlike as yourself?' It may be a small point, 
but this appeal to your 'Christian charity' seems 
to confirm your belief that it was the apparition 
of Deeming that made it to you to-day. But 
what happened then?" 

"Well," said she, taking up the thread of her 
[192] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

story, "while he was saying this he kept his 
eyes on mine — great, pleading eyes like those 
of a dog: — they made me think he was trying 
to say things for which he could not find words, 
and — I don't know why — I began to feel sorry 
for him. 

" 'I don't understand at all what you mean,' 
I said. 'Your awful crimes horrify me, and I 
can hardly bear to look at you. Why should 
you distress me as you do?' 

" 'I don't want to distress you,' he re- 
plied, 'but I must get out of this horrible 
place !' 

" 'What do you mean by "this horrible 
place" ? I cannot understand you.' 

" 'I can't make you understand,' he said. 
'They won't let me.' I don't know what he 
meant by 'they,' but I thought it was some 
beings that controlled him, though I could see 
nothing. Then he went on in a long, confused 
talk which I could only partly follow. 

"The substance of what he said was this, as 
nearly as I could gather it. His body was 
buried in quicklime in a criminal's unmarked 
grave; I think he said under the wall of the 
jail, but of this I am not sure — and as long as 
a trace of it remained he was tied down to the 
scenes of his crime and punishment. If he could 
[193] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

only find some one who would pity him, and 
show it by 'an act of Christian charity' — he 
used the expression again — his term of suffer- 
ing here would be shortened, and he could ( go 
on; 1 that was the way he put it, although he 
did not seem to know what it meant. His talk 
was vague and rambling, and seemed to me 
very incoherent; but his distress was plain 
enough, and when he stopped speaking (which 
was not for some time, for he kept going back 
and repeating as if he were trying to make his 
meaning clearer) I had lost all feeling except 
that here was a creature in great trouble, and 
that I ought to help him if I could 

"When he had finished I asked 'him how I 
could show him the 'Christian charity' he had 
spoken about. 

11 'By giving me something,' he replied, 
'and being sorry for me when you give it.' 

" 'I am sorry for you,' I said. 'Isn't that 
enough?' 

" 'No.' he answered, 'that isn't enough. You 
might have done it if you had bought the soap 
from me the other day.' 

" 'So it is money you want?' I asked. 

" 'Yes,' he said, 'money will do. or anything 
else that you value.' 

" 'Will you stay where you are until I can get 
[194] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

some?' I asked: — and he said, yes, he would 
stay where he was. 

"So I went into my room and took some 
money from my purse, and went back and 
showed it to him; there was a half-crown, a 
shilling and some coppers — there they are, on 
the dressing table beside you." 

"So you did not give them to him, after all?" 
I inquired, taking up the coins and examining 
them. 

"Oh, yes, I did," replied my wife; "and that 
is the strangest part of the whole thing. 

"As I said, I showed him the money and 
asked him if that would do; and he said it 
would. 

"Then I said: 'I am not going to open this 
door. How can I give these coins to you?' 

" 'You don't need to open it,' he answered. 
'There is a hat rack there behind you, with a 
marble shelf in it — put them on that shelf.' 

"I stepped back to the hat rack and put the 
money on the shelf, watching him all the time. 
I glanced at the coins an instant as I laid them 
down, and when I looked at the door again 
there was nobody there. I instantly turned to 
the hat rack again, but the shelf was bare — the 
coins had disappeared, too ! 

"I rushed to the door to unlock it and run 

[195] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

into the street, for I thought Deeming had got 
into the house : — but just as I had my hand on 
the key I heard his voice in front of me. 

" 'Don't be afraid,' the voice said. 'I haven't 
moved.' 

" 'But how did you get the money?' I asked. 

" 'You wouldn't understand if I should tell 
you,' replied the voice. 

" 'But I can't see you !' I exclaimed. 

" 'No,' said the voice, 'and you never will 
again. I have gone on.' 

" 'But you are not going away with my 
money, are you?' I asked. 'Do you need it 
?' 

No,' the voice replied, 'I do not need it. 
You gave it to me because you pitied me — I 
have no more use for it.' 

" 'Can you give it back to me?' I asked. 

" 'I have given it back,' said the voice. 
'Look on the hat rack.' 

"I heard something jingle behind me, and 
as I turned around I saw the coins all lying on 
the shelf again." 

The conclusion of this prodigious history 
found me in a state very nearly approaching 
stupefaction. It was not so much the facts 
themselves which it embodied as the sugges- 

[i 9 6] 



now 

(C < 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

tions they inspired that appalled me, and the 
glimpse they seemed to afford of mysteries the 
human race has for ages shrinkingly guessed at, 
chilled me to the marrow of my bones. "Can 
such things be?" was the question I asked my- 
self again and again as I struggled to regain 
my composure: — and although this experience 
seemed a natural and fitting sequence in the 
drama that had been enacted in that house 
under my own eyes, I am free to say I could 
not on the instant credit it. 

My wife detected my hesitation at once, and 
said: 

"I see you cannot believe what I have told 
you, and I do not wonder at it : — but it is true, 
for all that." 

"I know you think so," I replied; "and in 
view of the very many other strange events you 
have taken part in — and I with yqu in a num- 
ber of them — I ought to have no jdoubts. But 
this is the most staggering thing t ever heard 
of. Are you sure you were not dreaming?" 

"Well," she said, with a laugh, "I am not 
in the habit of dreaming at eleven o'clock on a 
bright, sunny morning, and when I have the 
care of the house on my hands. And then, the 
dogs: — do you think they were dreaming, 
too?" 

[197] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

"Ah, yes!" I exclaimed; "what about the 
dogs?" 

"I told you," she replied, "how they ran to 
the gate, barking, and then suddenly turned 
tail and rushed away in a panic as soon as they 
saw what was there. When Deeming had gone, 
I went out to look after them, but for a long 
time I could not find them. I called and I 
coaxed, but to no purpose. Finally I dis- 
covered them out in the farthest corner of the 
paddock, under the thick bushes, crowded to- 
gether in a heap, and trembling as though they 
had been whipped. I had to crawl in and drag 
them out, but I couldn't induce them to come 
near the house; at last I had to carry them in, 
and all the afternoon they have stuck close to 
me as though they felt the need of protection. 
It is only half an hour ago that I got them into 
their kennels and chained them up. You had 
better go out and see them." 

I did so, and found one kennel empty, and 
both dogs lying close together (as the length 
of their chains allowed them to do) in the straw 
of the other. I had never seen them do this 
before, since each was very jealous of intrusion 
by the other upon his quarters, and I was im- 
pressed by the circumstance. The poor brutes 
still showed unmistakable evidences of terror, 

[i 9 8] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

whimpered and whined and licked my hand as 
I petted them, and set up a concerted and 
agonized howl of protest when I left them. 
There was no doubt whatever that they had 
been horribly frightened — if not by the ghost 
of Deeming, by what? — it was certainly no 
merely physical agitation that their actions 
showed. 



[1993 



CHAPTER XII 

THE DEMONS OF THE DARK 

True to his promise, Deeming did not reap- 
pear, nor was there any subsequent manifesta- 
tion that seemed referable to him. To what 
new plane he had "gone on," and whether to 
one higher or lower, we could only guess; the 
door that had closed upon his exit had evidently 
shut in forever (as had been our experience in 
certain other like cases) a mystery to which, for 
a moment, we had almost felt we were about 
to hold the key. Of the problem of the future 
life we had a hint of the terms of the solu- 
tion, but the answer vanished before we could 
set it down below the ordered figures of the 
sum. Such, I believe, has been, is, and will be 
the constant fortune of all who venture far into 
the penetralia of the unseen. Now and then 
there seems to be an illumination — but it is not 
the radiance of discovered truth: — it is the 
lightning flash that warns away the profane in- 
truder, and if defied it blasts him in body or in 
mind. 

It was because of this conviction that my wife 
[200] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

and I, although having experience during many 
years of incomprehensible occurrences whose 
narration, should I set it down, would fill many 
books like this, steadfastly refrained from al- 
lowing ourselves to assume a mental attitude 
that might, so to speak, encourage them. Far 
from finding the influences (whatever they 
were — and on this point we were careful to 
make no inquiry, and never formulated any 
theory) reluctant to invitation to display them- 
selves, we were at times compelled to offer 
strenuous opposition to their approach: — even 
a passive receptivity to strange phenomena was 
not free from peril, and our previous knowl- 
edge of the unbalancing of more than one in- 
quiring mind that had pursued the subject of 
the occult with too great a temerity had con- 
vinced us that "that way danger lies" — and a 
very grave danger, too. 

To that danger we ourselves, as I believe, 
finally came to be exposed in our life in the 
House on the Hill : — not because we were lured 
to seek out the origin and nature of the forces 
about us, and thus gave ourselves up to their 
influence, but because the more or less constant 
exercise of that influence could not fail to have 
that effect, in spite of ourselves: — and it is to 
show how, as it seemed, and why, this effect 
[201] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

— at first unsuspected — grew toward its sinister 
culmination, that I undertake the writing of 
this final chapter. 

Meantime, I may say that the incidents at- 
tending the two spectral appearances that I 
have recorded, gave us occasion for much curi- 
ous speculation, in which there was a certain 
relief in indulging ourselves. The garments 
from the wardrobe of the hangman; was the 
murderer doomed to go through all Eternity in 
this hideous attire? The offered sale of soap; 
is the occupation of "drummer" or "bagman" 
practiced beyond the Styx, and for what ghostly 
manufacturers are orders solicited? Was the 
soap a sample? Was it for the toilette or the 
laundry? What was its price per cake, and 
was there any discount by the box? Then the 
shade's appeal for "Christian charity," and the 
acceptance of it in the tangible form of coin of 
the realm! The money was returned again, 
but had it meanwhile been entered in some 
misty ledger to the credit of its temporary 
bearer? If deposits are made, and balance- 
sheets issued in the Dark World, then might 
Deeming's account seem to be heavily over- 
drawn. Dealing in phantom money, and liqui- 
dating of shadowy notes-of-hand! — do we carry 
[202] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

with us into the Beyond not only our characters 
and personalities (as some believe) but also 
our occupations and ways of doing business? 
If Deeming' s discarnated action was thus to be 
explained, he must have been in Hell, in- 
deed! 

Reflections such as these may strike the reader 
as flippant, but they were among the natural 
results of the circumstances. There was some- 
thing so personal and intimate in these mid-day 
visits of the apparition, it was itself so seem- 
ingly tangible and even human, and in its ex- 
pressions of thought and manifestations of emo- 
tion seemed to have experienced so slight an 
essential change from the conditions with which 
the living man had been acquainted, that there 
was little to excite horror in the event, after 
all. If the phantom had imparted to us no in- 
formation, it had at least given us a hint that 
there was progress in the realms of the here- 
after, and had awakened a vague belief that 
at the end of all there might be pardon. This 
suggestion was tenuous and elusive ; but it was 
afforded, nevertheless, and I still cling to the 
hope that it inspired. 

In writing this strange chronicle I have not 
attempted to set down all our experiences in 
[203] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

that house of mystery, but only such as have 
seemed to me unusual, or representative of the 
manifestations as a whole. There were cer- 
tain other phenomena so vague and evasive that 
I am unable to find words whereby to describe 
their nature or to convey the impression they 
caused : — all that I can say of them is that they 
seemed to invite us to an inquiry into some 
secret which the house contained, and to beckon 
to the success of such an investigation. We 
often discussed this apparent suggestion, but 
never acted upon it: — chiefly because, as I 
think, we were not at all sure it was not of 
subjective, rather than objective, origin — the 
natural result of the mental ferment which such 
a protracted series of weird happenings might 
be expected to cause. Moreover, as everything 
that had so far occurred had been without any 
conscious encouragement on our part, we felt 
some fear (as I have intimated above) of what 
might befall us if we endeavored to place our- 
selves completely en rapport with the agencies 
that seemed to be at work about us. There- 
fore we maintained as well as we could our 
isolated and non-conductive position, and re- 
frained from all encouragement to the sugges- 
tions that were more and more forcibly borne 
in upon us that we should seek an understanding 
[204] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

of the meaning of the things that had so much 
disturbed us. 

Yet I cannot refrain from stating my convic- 
tion that the phenomena which I have en- 
deavored to describe in these pages had their 
origin, not in any disturbed or morbid condition 
of the mind in any of the three persons who 
were affected by them, but in some undiscovered 
cause local and peculiar to the place of their 
occurrence. If this were not the case, it seems 
singular that manifestations of a like nature 
did not present themselves at other times and 
in other places. Any such persistent and start- 
ling incidents as those that were displayed in 
the House on the Hill were, happily, foreign 
elsewhere both to my wife's experience and to 
my own — such other influences as have seemed 
to come about us having apparently been unaf- 
fected by conditions of period and locality, and 
being almost always of a mild and gentle nature. 

Whether our tacit refusal to seek a solution 
of the mystery that had so long brooded over 
us had anything to do with the even more seri- 
ous and startling events that occurred during 
the final period of our residence, I cannot tell. 
I have often thought so : — at all events this 
record would be incomplete without setting 
them down. 

[205] 



TIUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

It is not to be denied that the adventures in 
which we had participated for nearly a year, 
came finally to have a serious effect upon us, 
both physically and mentally. Our cariosity 
and interest had long ago become sated, and of 
late we had felt the slow bat steady growth of 
something like apprehension : — an -apprehension 
even more acute than that which might be in- 
spired by any definite occasion for fear, since 
it looked forward to uncertainties for which 
there seemed to be no definition. But the days 
passed slowly by until only two weeks remained 
before the expiration of our lease, and, since 
the incident of the brooch which I have de- 
scribed, nothing seriously untoward had oc- 
: u r r e i . 

Yet we had lately been conscious that the 
character of the influence that had so long pos- 
sessed our habitation seemed to be undergoing 
a change. I cannot describe this change ex- 
cept to say that it took die form of an ominous 
quiescence. The elfish entities whose cantrips 
had served more to amuse and mystify than to 
annoy us, seemed suddenly to have abandoned 
the premises as if retiring before some superior 
approach, and the wraiths of the women and 
the child were no more seen or heard about the 
rooms or in the hall: — instead of these, we 
[206] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

vaguely recognized the presence of a might}' 
force made itself manifest neither to the 

eye nor the ear. but was evident through some 
latent or inner sense whose function was to 
apprehendit. I cannot explain how the im- 
pression was conveyed, but we somehow knew 
-risen::- was mahg.oant and foreboded 

n; and a disturbing uneasiness grew upon 
man diminished as rime elapsed, and 

ything remained upon the surface serene 
and calm. 

While the familiar occurrences to which we 
had been accustomed never Lost their sense of 
strangeness, the present cessation of them 
seemed more uncanny still: we had an uneasy 
and growing sense of something serious be bag 
about to happen, and often expressed to - 
other our common feeling of alarm. The eir- 

stance that disquieted us most was that, 

reas nearly all the events in which we had 
shared bub::;: had taken place by day. this 
new obsession was felt chiefiy at night: — it 
seemed to enwrap the house in an equal a: a::: 
with the gathering darkness, and each evening 
at sundown we lighted every gas-jet. and sat 
bout together under the influence of 
an urgent craving for coma am mshio. We 
were like soectators sitting in a theatre between 

> 7 ] 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

two acts of a compelling performance; behind 
the lowered curtain a situation was preparing 
whose nature we could not guess; we appre- 
hended rather than perceived that the stage was 
being reset, the scenery shifted, a new develop- 
ment provided for — and we feared beyond 
measure to see the curtain lift again, as we felt 
assured it would. 

The climax came at last, and in a sudden and 
awful manner. Our nameless apprehension had 
caused us, of late, to spend as many evenings 
as possible abroad — visiting friends and ac- 
quaintances, or attending entertainments in the 
city. Returning late one night from the theatre, 
our friend and I went into the dining-room, 
while my wife retired to her chamber to pre- 
pare for bed. We had been chatting a few 
moments when we heard a piercing shriek from 
my wife's room; and rushing in we were hor- 
rified to see her standing close against the wall, 
her face white and drawn with terror, appar- 
ently striving to free herself from some being 
that held her firmly in its clutches. Her aspect 
was so unearthly that we stood for a moment 
literally frozen on the threshold: — then she 
seemed to be lifted up bodily and thrown across 
the bed, where she lay with eyes protruding, 
and hands frantically tearing at her throat as if 
[208] 



THE HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

trying to free herself from some powerful grip 
that was choking her. We rushed to her and 
raised her to a sitting position, but she was torn 
from us again and again, and from the gasping 
and throttled sounds that came from her throat 
we felt that she was dying. We cried out in 
incoherent frenzy to her unseen tormentors to 
be gone, and struck wildly at the air as if there 
were about her palpable objects of our blows. 
This dreadful struggle lasted for several min- 
utes; at times we apparently prevailed, again 
we were overwhelmed: — finally the influence 
seemed to pass, and I laid her back upon the 
pillows, still panting and trembling but no 
longer suffocating, as she whispered: "Thank 
God, they have gone I" 

This experience had been so frightful, and 
so foreign to all others that had befallen us, 
that I found myself reluctant to refer it to un- 
natural agencies, and tried to explain it as a 
fit of some kind by which my wife had been 
attacked — although I knew that she had never 
had such a seizure in all her life, and was in 
perfect physical and mental health. Moreover, 
when she soon complained of her throat hurting 
her, I looked more closely, and with amaze- 
ment saw upon both sides of her neck the marks 
that no one could have mistaken as other than 
[209] , 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

those left by the fingers of a pair of powerful 
hands ! 

At this sight the little courage that remained 
to me abandoned me entirely, and I could see 
that our friend was equally unmanned. "We 
must leave this house!" we exclaimed in the 
same breath : — and as we spoke my wife cried 
out: "Oh! they are here again!" and at once 
the ghastly combat was renewed. 

This time our friend and I made no effort to 
fight against the demons — if such they were ; we 
seized the half-conscious woman in our arms, 
and partly carried, partly dragged her out of 
the house. The Possession seemed to leave her 
at the door, and the fresh air soon revived her. 
But there was no going back for any of us that 
night. It was late summer, and the air was 
warm: — so, bareheaded, and with my wife 
guarded between her two male protectors, we 
walked the deserted streets until the rising of 
the sun gave us courage to return home. 

I shall not forget those hours of midnight 
and early morning: — the serene and amethyst- 
colored Australian sky strewn with star-dust 
and set with twinkling constellations, and the 
dark earth about us — across which, as from 
time to time we approached the house from 
which we had been expelled, the light from its 

* [ 2I °3 



THE. HAUNTED BUNGALOW 

windows and from its open door gleamed bale- 
fully. All was silent within, but we feared the 
lurking presence and dared not enter, and after 
one or two returns remained only within view 
of it until daybreak was well advanced. Our 
conversation throughout the vigil need not be 
recorded, but the reader may guess its import: 
— the awful experience through which we had 
passed had brought powerfully to our minds 
the thought of Deeming in the feature of the 
throttling hands, since in all his murders there 
was evidence upon the throats of his victims 
that strangulation had preceded the operation 
of the knife. But my wife opposed this grisly 
suggestion: — it was not the shade of the mur- 
derer, she affirmed, that had attacked her, al- 
though she could give no description of Her 
assailants — they were dark, formless shapes — 
resembling neither man nor beast; things more 
felt than seen, even to her. 

Yet in spite of this assurance, when I re-en- 
tered the house and saw in its usual place above 
my writing table the plaster mould which I had 
carried from the murderer's cell in the Mel- 
bourne jail, I recalled with a new appreciation 
of their appositeness the words of the worthy 
governor. 

Whatever the influence was that had ap- 



TRUE TALES OF THE WEIRD 

palled us, we had not sufficient courage to 
oppose it, and so hastened our preparations for 
departure that we finally quitted the house a 
week before our lease expired; and within a 
month saw the shores of Australia fade behind 
us as our steamer turned its prow toward Aden, 
Suez, and Marseilles. There was one recur- 
rence of the phenomenon I have just described 
during the last few nights of our possession, 
but we evaded it by taking to the street again, 
and again passing the night therein. 

It was on a sunny morning in early March 
— the month answering in the inverted seasons 
of the Antipodes to September of northern lati- 
tudes — that we turned the key that locked us 
out for the last time from that house of 
shadows. As we reached the street we turned 
with one accord to look back upon it: — how in- 
viting it appeared in the brilliant sunshine, amid 
its attractive surroundings of grassy lawn set 
with shrubs in flower, its smiling orchard and 
garden! We looked into one another's faces, 
and each saw therein the reflection of his own 
thoughts: — there was the relief such as they 
feel who awake from an oppressive dream ; yet 
the place had been our home ! 

THE END 

[212] 






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Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Nov. 2004 

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